““We learned about life as children and it is necessary to change the way we intellectually view life in order to stop being the victim of the old tapes. By looking at, becoming conscious of, our attitudes, definitions, and perspectives, we can start discerning what works for us and what does not work. We can then start making choices about whether our intellectual view of life is serving us – or if it is setting us up to be victims because we are expecting life to be something which it is not.” – (Text in this color is used for quotes from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls)

In the course of writing this article – which seems to be turning into another online book – I realized that though I talk a lot about the importance of emotional honesty in my work, I probably do not give a lot of down to earth, easily understood examples of what the term means to me. So, I decided to start this Chapter 3 with an example.

It was focusing on the dynamic of expectations that was the key for me in starting to get emotionally honest with myself. Starting to understand the cause and effect relationship between my emotional reactions and my expectations was essential for me to start understanding why my relationship with life was so dysfunctional. I, of course, in my codependency, had swung between the extremes of feeling, and believing, that it was all my fault because of my shameful defective being – and being angry and resentful at other people, the system, something or someone external to my being.

The twelve step recovery application of the disease model in the treatment of alcoholism – the concept that I had been powerless over my past behaviors because I had a disease – helped me to take enough shame out of my perspective of myself to start seeing my life with a little bit of objectivity. The spiritual approach of the twelve step program – that there is a Power greater than myself that is on my side, The Force is with me – helped me to shift my intellectual paradigm enough to start to see life as something other than a test I could fail by doing it “wrong.” The definition of insanity that I heard in my first days of recovery – doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results – caused me to start focusing on cause and effect.

It was the concept of powerlessness that led me to start becoming empowered to take responsibility for my life. Instead of viewing life through a perspective that was black and white – either I had to be perfect or I was shameful – I was able to start to see what my part had been in how painful and miserable my life experience had been. How I had some responsibility – how I was creating cause in my life that had negative consequences – but that it did not mean that there was something inherently wrong with me. I started seeing that my relationship with life was dysfunctional, was not working, and that I could take some action to change that relationship.

Insane Expectations – Road Rage

The specific area that opened me up to a new perspective on my insanity, was starting to understand what my part was in the road rage I was experiencing driving on the streets and freeways of Los Angeles. Looking at the cause and effect relationship between my expectations and the rage I was feeling at all the stupid blankety blank drivers in Southern California greatly accelerated my process of becoming emotionally honest with myself – and opening up my mind to a Spiritual Awakening, a paradigm shift in consciousness.

“There is an old joke about the difference between a neurotic and a psychotic. The psychotic truly believes that 2 + 2 = 5. The neurotic knows that it is 4 but can’t stand it. That was the way I lived most of my life, I could see how life was but I couldn’t stand it. I was always feeling like a victim because people and life were not acting in the way I believed they “should” act.

I expected life to be different than it is. I thought if I was good and did it “right” then I would reach ‘happily ever after.’ I believed that if I was nice to people they would be nice to me. Because I grew up in a society where people were taught that other people could control their feelings, and vise versa, I had spent most of my life trying to control the feelings of others and blaming them for my feelings.

By having expectations I was giving power away. In order to become empowered I had to own that I had choices about how I viewed life, about my expectations. I realized that no one can make me feel hurt or angry – that it is my expectations that cause me to generate feelings of hurt or anger. In other words, the reason I feel hurt or anger is because other people, life, or God are not doing what I want them, expect them, to do.

I had to learn to be honest with myself about my expectations – so I could let go of the ones that were insane (like, everyone is going to drive the way I want them to), and own my choices – so I could take responsibility for how I was setting myself up to be a victim in order to change my patterns. Accept the things I cannot change – change the things I can.” – Serenity and Expectations – intimately interrelated

Expecting other drivers to drive the way I think they “should” is absolutely, incredibly insane. Talk about egotistical and arrogant. I, being an excellent driver myself (how many people do you know that don’t think they are excellent drivers?), knew how people should drive – I was right and anyone who didn’t drive the way I thought they “should” was wrong. I felt extremely, righteously justified in ranting and raving and cussing out other drivers – sometimes cutting them off and giving them the finger, while wishing I had a laser mounted on the roof of my car so that I could just vaporize them. Luckily, this was in the days before people started shooting each other on the Freeways, or I may not have ever made it into recovery. Actually, this was something I continued to do into my first few years of recovery.

Detaching enough to look with some objectivity at how I was relating to driving a car in L. A., allowed me to awaken to how insane it was to allow my emotions to be dictated by such a ridiculous expectation. Then I was also able to look at my emotional reactions and get in touch with how dishonest I was being emotionally in relationship to other drivers.

What I came to understand about my emotional experience of driving, was that one of two things was happening. One was, that other drivers were scaring me. The way they were driving – either too slow or too fast, cutting me off, swerving back and forth between lanes, etc. – was causing an actual fear of survival reaction. That kind of primal human emotional response that is generated by a sudden loud noise or any perception of a threat of physical harm.

When something scared me, and I reacted to the fear with anger – that was emotionally dishonest. I wasn’t owning my true feelings. In reaction to the jolt of fear energy that shot through me, I became the angry, self righteous victim of the other drivers “idiocy.” The reality that this happened almost every time I drove on the freeway, just proved to me how many idiots there were out there – because I was relating to the experience from a victim perspective. It was impossible for me to have any serenity because I was giving other drivers the power to throw me into anger – which often triggered the suppressed rage I was carrying at how unfair, unjust, and painful life was.

Once I started to look at what my part was in those emotional reactions, at how I was setting myself up with my expectations, then I could start to take responsibility for changing that which I have the power to change. I learned to accept the thing I cannot change – other drivers – and change the thing I can, my attitude towards other drivers. It was when I realized that this anger was emotionally dishonest, and what my part in empowering that emotional reaction was, that I was able to start taking back the power over my feelings that I was giving to those “idiots.”

After that, when something another driver did scared me, I would own the fear. I would say out loud, “That scared me.” Then I would say a prayer for the other driver. I would ask that the other driver be helped to become happy, joyous, and free (knowing that the process of them opening up to that possibility would involve having their denial ripped away so they were not so unconscious – a prayer both Spiritually aligned and humanly selfish 😉 – and would offer up the incident as an amends for one of the thousands of times I had done something while driving that scared other drivers.

(During my years pursuing an acting career in Hollywood – the role of suffering artist being perfect for both my alcoholism / addiction and my codependent martyrdom – I lived out the romantic vision of the struggling actor by making my living by waiting tables and parking cars and driving a taxi. Driving a cab for several years – often stoned – really built up the number of driving amends I owe. Seeing those incidents as Karmic – what goes around comes around – also played a part in helping me to stop buying into the belief I was being unfairly victimized on the freeway.)

The second thing that I realized was happening, had to do with fear also. This was the fear that caused me to try to control life. That fear caused me to be very self obsessed. I was getting angry because those people were getting in my way. The immature, self centered perspective of life which was dictating my relationship with life, caused me to think and act as if I was the only person who was important. I reacted out of an ego selfishness that told me these idiots should get out of my way because I had places to go and things to do that were much more important than anything they were doing.

This ego driven, self centered fear was directly related – both as cause and effect – to my unconsciousness, my inability to be present in the moment. I was always caught up in the past or the future, and related to driving in traffic as a great inconvenience that was slowing me down. (Which, also, sometimes led to me driving too fast and cutting between lanes.)

The society I grew up in taught me that reaching the destination was what I should focus upon, was the thing that was vitally important. I was always striving to reach the destination where I would be fixed, where I would be respected and loved. When I reached that destination (college degree, fame and fortune, the right relationship, the Academy Award, etc.) then I would live “happily ever after.”

I was forever in pursuit – either of the illusive “happily ever after,” or for something to distract me from, or kill the pain of, feeling defective because I had not already reached the destination. I was always bouncing between the extremes: trying to figure out how to control my life, how to do the “right” things, to get “there” – or working on going unconscious (with alcohol, drugs, obsession, rumination, food, whatever) to escape the pain of being “here.” Being “here,” being present in the moment in my own skin, was too painful because I had a dysfunctional relationship with my own emotions – and was carrying a ton of suppressed grief energy.

And it was so painful emotionally because the subconscious intellectual paradigm that was dictating my relationship with self and life, was insane, delusional, and dysfunctional. I could never relax and enjoy life (without some chemical help, either from a substance or from an illusion/fantasy about love or success that would affect my brain chemistry) because wherever my life was at that point – according to the critical parent voice in my head – was not good enough and was my fault, or their fault. I was always feeling like a victim. (Empowerment and Victimization – the power of choice)

I needed to start letting go of that destination programming and start learning how to be in the moment. To actually be present and conscious while driving my car. (What a concept!) To start relating to driving as being a perfect part of my journey, a classroom – a wonderful arena for Spiritual growth.

When the rush hour traffic was disrupting my plans of getting someplace by a certain time, I would practice my Spiritual program. I would take some deep breaths to get into, and conscious of, my body. Then I would thank the Universe for this wonderful opportunity to practice patience and acceptance. I would take some steps to let go of the urgency I felt – the inner child’s fear of doing it “wrong,” the feeling that the world would come to an end if things did not go the way I had planned them. I would remind myself that life was a journey, and that this moment was a perfect part of that journey. I would talk to my inner children and tell them it was okay – that if I was going to be late, that was a perfect part of God’s plan. I would let go of my picture of how I thought things have to unfold for me to be okay. I would affirm that I am Unconditionally Loved and am being guided on my journey.

I would look around me, to see if there was something the Goddess wanted me to see – and that perhaps, was the reason I was stuck in traffic. I would remind myself that it was possible that this delay was really a wonderful gift. That perhaps because I was being delayed: I would not be in a traffic accident later that day: or the timing would be perfect for me to run into someone I needed to see, that without the delay I would have missed; or something to that effect.

I would remind myself that I am not in control of life, I am not writing the script, so:

I need to surrender the illusion that I am in control; remember that I have a Loving Higher Power who is in control; and be willing to accept reality as it was being presented to me, and take whatever action I could to make the best of the situation – to align with God’s will so I could flow with the Universal plan. (Work steps 1, 2, & 3 – the dance of recovery.)

That action may just be to relax, be in the moment, and do some prayer and meditation (talk and listen to The Great Spirit – which can certainly include expressing my irritation for the delay.) The action may be to figure out an alternate route, get off the freeway at the next opportunity and take surface streets – but not with that feeling of life and death urgency, rather with sense of adventure. “This is an interesting twist, let’s see how this unfolds.”

I started to learn to take responsibility for my feelings – to own the things I have some control over. Learning how to be emotionally honest with myself allowed me to start becoming empowered to take responsibility for my life and stop empowering insane expectations. By focusing on letting go of the belief in victimization that was caused by my attitudes and perspectives – the mental level of my being – I could greatly decrease the feelings of victimization, the amount of emotional energy that was being generated on an emotional level. I still had some feelings of being victimized, but I could be nurturing and Loving in relationship to those feelings – and set some Loving boundaries with my inner children who were reacting out of the immediate gratification urgency of a child. (I am just going to die if I don’t get what I want!)

I learned to develop an observer self – a mature, recovering adult with a Spiritual perspective – that could tell the critical parent voice to shut up with all the shame and fear messages, and assure my inner children that everything was going to be okay because there is a Higher Power in charge of my life. (Learning to Love our self)

Twisted and Distorted is the Dance of the Emotional Cripple

“We are set up to be emotionally dysfunctional by our role models, both parental and societal. We are taught to repress and distort our emotional process. We are trained to be emotionally dishonest when we are children.”

Early in my recovery, it was vital for me to start realizing how emotionally crippled I had been by the role modeling and messages I had experienced growing up in an emotionally dishonest and dysfunctional culture. I had to become conscious of how dysfunctional my relationship with my own emotions was, in order to start healing the dysfunction in my relationship with my self and life.

The single most important influence in the development of a person’s relationship with their own emotions is role modeling. Mom and Dad were our primary role models for how a male emotional being and female emotional being behave, for how they relate to, and express, their emotions. (As well as for how male and female relate to each other.) The cultural role models that we were exposed to – through books, movies, television, etc., – play an important factor also, but our primary role models were our parents.

The direct messages we got – both verbal (big boys don’t cry, little ladies don’t get angry, there is nothing to be afraid of, etc.) and behavioral (punishment for expressing emotions) – and indirect messages (the ways we interpreted and internalized the behavior of other people – parents, teachers, peers, etc. – as being personal punishment, as being our fault) we got both from our parents and from society play a part in that development, but role modeling has the greatest impact.

“In order to find out who we are, we have to start being emotionally honest with ourselves. And in order to be emotionally honest with ourselves, we have to start changing our perspective on our own emotional process.

As a child, I learned from the role modeling of my father that the only emotion that a man felt was anger. From my mother, whose definition of love included the belief that you cannot be angry at someone you love, I learned that it was not okay to be angry at anyone I loved. That left me with very little permission to feel anything. That did not mean that I did not have feelings – it meant that I was at war with my own emotions, that I could not be honest with myself about having them. As long as I could not be honest with myself emotionally there was no way I could know who I was. Until I started owning the grief and rage from my childhood, the sadness and hurt and fear that I had denied all of my life, I was incapable of being honest with myself, incapable of knowing who I Truly was.”

I remember very distinctly the thoughts I had in one of my first AA meetings when several people at a podium spoke of being afraid. My thought was, “Who are these people – talking so much about being afraid. I was never afraid. They stuck guns in my face and it didn’t scare me.”

I did not have permission from my self to acknowledge that I felt fear, because I had learned growing up that real men do not feel fear. I was emotionally crippled because I did not have permission to own my fear – or my pain or sadness. I had no permission to be emotionally vulnerable – “weak.” So, like the manly man I was trained to be, instead of owning that I was afraid or hurt, I got angry.

The Truth, as I soon came to understand it, is that I had really been scared of everyone and everything. I was scared because I knew I was not perfect, and I was sure that other people would discover what a shameful loser I was. Scared that I would fail the life test – that I would never reach “happily ever after.” Afraid that I would never find someone to Love me. The little boy inside of me was scared that god would punish me for being unworthy – scared of being condemned to burn in hell forever.

While pursuing an acting career, I would pontificate to other actors, sharing my wisdom about the key to building a true character – which was to understand the characters gut level fears. I maintained that all people were driven by their gut levels fears, and that any other levels of motivation were in reaction to that level of fear. I was a very good actor. I could really make characters come alive because of my insights into the human emotional process. However, I personally was not afraid of anything.

Talk about emotional dishonesty. The power of denial is truly awesome. I could see other people with some degree of clarity, but I did not have a clear perspective of my my self.

What is so insidious about codependency, is that it is entrenched in our core relationship with self and life. The intellectual paradigm that determines our perspective of our self – and therefore how we behave in relationship to life and other people – is subconscious until we get into recovery and start becoming conscious enough to stop being the victim of false beliefs, of delusional and insane expectations. Until we start becoming conscious, we are powerless over our behavior because we cannot see our self with any objectivity. Since the only choices in the polarized perspective of life (that was imposed upon me in childhood) were right or wrong – and wrong was shameful – my ego tried to protect me from the toxic shame I felt at the core of my being with denial and rationalization.

To own the incredible pain and shame I felt at the core of my being, the self hatred I felt towards myself for being imperfect and unlovable, felt like a threat to my survival. So, my ego kept me in denial of any feelings which were not acceptable to the perspective of being a man I learned in childhood.

The subconscious beliefs that were dictating my relationship with self, told me that fear was not an acceptable emotion for a man – so I had to deny that I had any fear. My subconscious intellectual paradigm, the beliefs that were defining my relationship with my own gender and emotions, severely limited my perspective of myself.

As long as I had a distorted and twisted perspective of my own emotions it was impossible to see my self with any clarity. I was powerless to understand my self and my behaviors until I started to get emotionally honest with my self. It is not possible for a person to be honest in relationships until they start getting emotionally honest in their relationship with self.

Control and fear – thinking to avoid feeling

Attempts to control are a reaction to fear. I attempted to control life because I was so afraid. As I explain in my book Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls, human beings have been doing life backwards due to a condition of reversity in the planetary energy field of Collective Human Emotional Consciousness. One of the effects of this condition, is living life focused externally – trying to control things over which we have no control – while simultaneously judging and shaming ourselves because the way we are living life is not working.

“I spent most of my life doing the Serenity prayer backwards, that is, trying to change the external things over which I had no control – other people and life events mostly – and taking no responsibility (except shaming and blaming myself) for my own internal process – over which I can have some degree of control. Having some control is not a bad thing; trying to control something or somebody over which I have no control is what is dysfunctional. It was very important for me to start learning how to recognize the boundaries of where I ended and other people began, and to start realizing that I can have some control over my internal process in ways that are not shaming and judgmental – that I can stop being the victim of myself.”

I had to deny any emotions that were not acceptable to my subconscious programming in order to feel that I had some control of my life. Since the only acceptable emotion to the definition of being a man I had learned growing up was anger – and even anger was only acceptable to feel in relationship to other men – I had to deny almost all of my feelings.

As a child I had to learn to disassociate, to not be present in the moment in my own skin, because the emotional pain was too great. The primary way I learned to be unconscious early on was to be in my head to avoid the feelings. Later on, I would use drugs and alcohol to escape being present “here” – in my body in the moment – but even then being in my head was my primary defense against feeling my feelings.

I would fantasize, intellectualize, and analyze. I would focus on something or someone outside of myself – and was always caught up in the past or future. I was not capable of being present in my own skin in the moment because it was not okay to feel my feelings. Because I was living in so much fear – at the same time I could not acknowledge that I felt any fear – I had to put a great deal of energy into denying that fear.

I would escape from my emotional reality by thinking about the future – creating grandiose fantasies of a positive nature (rehearsing my Academy Award acceptance speech, or fantasizing about the unavailable woman I was currently obsessing about) or of a negative nature (worry, impending doom, financial insecurity) – or ruminating on the past, either beating myself up for something “stupid” I said or did, or wallowing in resentment and self pity about how someone had victimized me. This is very dysfunctional because it generates more emotional energy.

“Worry is negative fantasizing. It is a fantasy that is being created in reaction to feeling fear. It is not real – it is something that is being created because my mind has slipped into the old familiar rut of right and wrong thinking. Worry is not a feeling – it is a reaction, an negative emotional state, that is created by the perspectives of a belief system that empowers illusions like failure. The sooner that we can pull ourselves out of that rut and start seeing the situation as part of a learning process – shift back into a recovery perspective – the less negative emotional response we will generate in relationship to the situation.

Emotions do not have value in and of themselves – they just are. What gives emotions value is how we react to them. We were programmed to react negatively to emotions and adapted defenses to try to keep from feeling emotional energy. Being in our head worrying about the past or the future, is a defense against being in our own skin and feeling our feelings. But it is dysfunctional – it does not work. Reacting negatively to our feelings generates more feelings. The more we worry, the more fear we generate. . . . . . .

When I catch myself worrying then I know that I am not being emotionally honest with myself. Worry is a symptom that tells me I am avoiding some feelings.” – Discernment in relationship to emotional honesty and responsibility 2

In order to start getting emotionally honest with myself, I had to start becoming aware of the ways in which I was avoiding my feelings. I learned to observe myself so that I could be conscious enough to catch myself when I was thinking to try to avoid feeling.

I realized that any time I was worrying about “what if,” or fantasizing about “if only,” or obsessing about a woman or the outcome of a situation, it was sign that I was being dishonest with myself emotionally. I started to become aware of all the ways I had been taught by society to keep my feelings at bay. The ways I talked and thought that helped me stay in denial of my feelings.

“Emotions are energy. Actual physical energy that is manifested in our bodies. Emotions are not thoughts – they do not exist in our mind. Our mental attitudes, definitions, and expectations can create emotional reactions, can cause us to get stuck in emotional states – but thoughts are not emotions. The intellectual and emotional are two distinctly separate though intimately interconnected parts of our being. In order to find some balance, peace, and sanity in recovery it is vitally important to start separating the emotional from the intellectual and to start setting boundaries with, and between, the emotional and mental parts of our self. . . . . .

. . . . . . . I had to become aware that there were such things as emotions that lived in my body and then I had to start learning how to recognize and sort them out. I had to become aware of all the ways that I was trained to distance myself from my feelings. I am going to mention a few of them here to help any of you reading this in your process of becoming emotionally honest.

Speaking in the third person. One of the defenses many of us have against feeling our feelings is to speak of ourselves in the third person. “You just kind of feel hurt when that happens” is not a personal statement and does not carry the power of speaking in the first person. “I felt hurt when that happened” is personal, is owning the feeling. Listen to yourself and to others and become aware of how often you hear others and yourself refer to self in the third person.

Avoiding using primary feeling words. There are only a handful of primary feelings that all humans feel. There is some dispute about just how many there are primary but for our purpose here I am going to use seven. Those are: angry, sad, hurt, afraid, lonely, ashamed, and happy. It is important to start using the primary names of these feelings in order to own them and to stop distancing ourselves from the feelings. To say “I am anxious” or “concerned” or “apprehensive” is not the same as saying “I am afraid.” Fear is at the root of all those other expressions but we don’t have to be so aware of our fear if we use a word that distances us from fear. Expressions like “confused,” “irritated,” “upset,” “tense,” “disturbed,” “melancholy,” “blue,” “good,” or “bad” are not primary feeling words.

Emotions are energy that is meant to flow: E – motion = energy in motion. Until we own it, feel it and release it, it cannot flow. By blocking and repressing our emotions we are damming up our internal energy and that will eventually result in some physical or mental manifestation such as cancer or Alzheimer’s disease or whatever.” – The Journey to the Emotional Frontier Within

Someone could ask me if I was afraid, and I would respond, “No, I’m not afraid. A little concerned perhaps, but certainly not afraid.” Saying, “I am feeling some fear.” is a quite different energetic experience from saying, “I am a bit apprehensive.” Naming and claiming the feeling is an important part of emotional honesty. There is power in the way we express ourselves. It is very important to start becoming aware of the emotional energy in our bodies. In order to be present in our own skins in the moment, it is necessary to be consciously in touch with our feelings.

There was no way that I could start changing the way I was relating to life until I started to own my fear. Fear is not a bad thing – just as sadness, pain, and anger are not negative or bad in and of themselves. Emotions are a vital part of our being that need to be owned, honored, and respected. Denial and repression of emotions is what leads to negative consequences.

“Emotions have a purpose, a very good reason to be – even those emotions that feel uncomfortable. Fear is a warning, anger is for protection, tears are for cleansing and releasing. These are not negative emotional responses! We were taught to react negatively to them. It is our reaction that is dysfunctional and negative, not the emotion.”

Human beings have a fear of the unknown for a reason. It is part of our survival programming. Because I did not have permission to own my fear, I was very out of balance emotionally. It was impossible for me to own that I had fear and still feel that I had worth as a man, so the only options I had – according to the subconscious programming of my childhood – were to deny my fear or feel that I was defective as a man.

“Fear is an emotion that exists to serve us. It provides a warning system to help us be aware of potential danger. It is appropriate and healthy to be aware when we are driving. To be conscious of potential threats. It is important for us to be in touch with our fear so that we can pay attention to it when it sends us a message.

What is not functional is to completely empower fear or to deny it. The 1 or 10 extremes of the disease.

Emotions are an incredibly powerful and important part of this experience we are having of being human. Emotions are a vital part of our being – and dictate the quality of our life experience.

“Emotions have two vitally important purposes for human beings. Emotions are a form of communication. Our feelings are one of the means by which we define ourselves. The interaction of our intellect and our emotions determines how we relate to ourselves.

Our emotional energy is also the fuel that propels us down the pathways of our life journey. E-motions are the orchestra that provide the music for our individual dances – that dictate the rhythmic flow and movement of our human dance. Our feelings help us to define ourselves and then provide the combustible fuel that dictates the speed and direction of our motion – rather we are flowing with it or damming it up within ourselves. . . . . . .

. . . . there are two primary transformers from which emotional energy is generated. Our ego self and our Spiritual Self. Our ego was traumatized in childhood and programmed very dysfunctionally. The ego is the seat of the disease of codependence.” – Discernment in relationship to emotional honesty and responsibility 2

The ego is the part of us that composed the score and conducts the music for our dance of codependence. It composed that score based upon the definitions, attitudes and beliefs it adapted in early childhood due to what our emotional experience of being a human child felt like.” – Newsletter part 2 May 2001 Update

Denying my fear was dysfunctional and emotionally dishonest. Focusing on fear, giving it a great deal of power, is also dysfunctional – and can be immobilizing. The extremes of the disease of codependency.

In writing the May 2001 Joy2MeU Update just quoted, I shared how I caught myself making a statement that set off alarm bells in my codependency control center – my observer self. Observing and listening to myself made me aware that my fear of intimacy issues were up to be looked at again. I subsequently did 3 Newsletter web pages of processing about those issues (and another 3 pages in my journal pages of the Joy2MeU Journal) in which I uncovered a level where I was being emotionally dishonest with myself – and was empowering some black and white thinking.

Recovery is on an ongoing process of uncovering, discovering, and recovering. We have layer upon layer of wounding – which means layer upon layer of denial, emotional dishonesty, and rationalized perspectives. We keep peeling another layer of the onion and getting to a deeper level of honesty – both intellectually and emotionally.

June 3rd will mark the 16th anniversary of my codependency recovery. (I write this some time ago – my anniversary is June 3rd 1986: The Story of Joy to You & Me) There are still times when I find the process irritating. But the benefits have been incredible. It is through healing my relationship with my self that I have found an incredible inner peace. That I have learned to be present in the moment – and have some moments of Joy – every day. Recovery works.

Focusing on the future or the past, blaming them or blaming me, underreacting or overreacting (stuffing my feelings until they exploded forth in ways that made me feel crazy and ashamed,) feeling triumphant over “winning” or wanting to die because I was such a loser, were the rhythms of my dance of codependency. As long as I was in denial and unconsciously reacting to life I was doomed to “keep doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results.” Unconsciousness doomed me to ride on a merry go round of cause and effect – never getting anywhere different emotionally. As long as I was incapable of being emotionally honest with myself, I was doomed to keep repeating the patterns that dictated my emotional reality.

“We live in a society where the emotional experience of “love” is conditional on behavior. Where fear, guilt, and shame are used to try to control children’s behavior because parents believe that their children’s behavior reflects their self-worth. . . . . . .

In a Codependent society we are taught, in the name of “love,” to try to control those we love, by manipulating and shaming them, to try to get them to do the right things – in order to protect our own ego-strength. Our emotional experience of love is of something controlling: ‘I love you if you do what I want you to do.” Our emotional experience of love is of something that is shaming and manipulative and abusive.

Love that is shaming and abusive is an insane, ridiculous concept. Just as insane and ridiculous as the concept of murder and war in the name of God.”

“What we traditionally have called normal parenting in this society is abusive because it is emotionally dishonest. Children learn who they are as emotional beings from the role modeling of their parents. “Do as I say – not as I do,” does not work with children. Emotionally dishonest parents cannot be emotionally healthy role models, and cannot provide healthy parenting.

Our model for what a family should be sets up abusive, emotionally dishonest dynamics.”

“When we say “I have to” we are making a victim statement. . . . . . . When we “have to” do something we feel like a victim. And because we feel victimized, we will then be angry, and want to punish, whomever we see as forcing us to do something we do not want to do – such as our family, or our boss, or society.””

In last month’s article I talked about shutting up the critical parent voice – and mentioned that among the messages that are coming from the critical parent are “shoulds” and “have tos.” In last months articles I started with the quote from my book about saying “have to” – and then went into different ways we express ourselves in relationship to our emotions that affect our relationship with our own emotions.

I decided that for this months topic I would discuss the “shoulds” and “have tos” in more depth, in relationship to setting ourselves up to feel like victims at this time of year. In my article Happy Holidays, Sad Holidays that I republished at the beginning of this month, I talk about how trying to live up to the fairy tale / fantasy that everyone is happy and cheerful at Christmas time – and judging myself for not feeling what I thought I “should” – caused me to feel depressed and suicidal during the Holiday Season. This is the time of year when the most suicides occur – because people are feeling despair that their lives aren’t what they “should” be.

It is so important to take the “shoulds” and “have tos” out of our vocabulary – both externally and internally in our mental process. “Should” and “have to” come from the critical parent voice in our head that is judging us according to false criteria from a black and white / right and wrong perspective – and we learned that programming from our parents in our family of origin (as well as from teachers in school, ministers and priests in church, etc., etc.).

You don’t “have to” spend the Holidays with your family. If you are going to spend time with your family over the Holidays because it is what you “should” do, what you “have to” do – then you are set up to feel like a victim and feel resentment. Feeling resentful and victimized is not a good ingredient to add to the Holiday emotional mix if you want to connect with some of the Spirit of Love that the Holiday Season is supposed to represent.

As I point out often in my writing, one of the major components of empowerment is owning that we have a choice. Unless you own that you have a choice to not spend time with your family during the Holidays, then you haven’t made a free choice to be there. Anytime we feel stuck in a situation, feel that we don’t have a choice – to leave a marriage or a job, to do something or not do something – we have not made a choice to stay. It is impossible to consciously commit to something if we don’t own that we have a choice not to do it.

So, if you spend time with your family during the Holidays because you “have to,” you are not being Loving. You are not being kind, you are not giving anything, unless you are doing it by conscious choice – which involves owning that you have a choice to not do it.

The other major component of empowerment is seeing reality as it is and making the best of it – instead of being the victim of it, wishing it was different, thinking it “should” be different. This includes seeing the reality of our families clearly. The families we grew up in were dysfunctional and emotionally dishonest because society is emotionally dishonest and dysfunctional. (In the latest chapter of the online book I am publishing on my web site right now, I discuss why normal is dysfunctional and how the conditions that caused that have changed in recent years. Normal Families are Dysfunctional)

We grew up in families / societies where our experience of love was shaming and controlling, because that is all our codependent parents knew – due to their childhood wounding. Unless our families are in recovery from codependency then their behavior is still manipulative and shaming. They want us to be there for the Holidays to support their ego image of themselves as parents – their fantasy about having a happy family that gathers lovingly for the Holidays.

Love is a verb. Love is defined by action. If the way someone treats you does not feel Loving, then it is not healthy Love. If the way your family treats you, if the way you feel when you are with them, does not feel Loving, it is important not to deny that reality. That is one reason why the Holidays are sad for many people. It is important to see that reality and own that sadness – instead of denying and rationalizing. Denying our feelings is harmful to us. It is not healthy.

When you look at their behavior and recognize the dishonesty and dysfunction, then you can also recognize that they are doing the best they can do. You can know they are not in recovery, may never be in recovery – and that they think they are demonstrating love when they use guilt and shame to try to get you to uphold their fantasy about the Holidays.

Once you recognize the reality and own that you have a choice, then you can make a choice to spend some time with them out of kindness. You can then make a choice that is Truly Loving, that is Truly giving.

And you can set boundaries with them that are Loving for you. There are not just two choices – the black and white extremes of the disease – there are choices in between 1 and 10. You can make a choice to spend some time with them, but limit the time so that you are not subjected to the dysfunction for too long.

One of my phone counseling clients yesterday shared with me a perfect example of making this kind of choice. In the past few years she had chosen not to be with her family because it was so painful. This year she was choosing to spend some time with them, with a very distinct boundary in place. Her boundary was that they would not start drinking until the evening, and that she would leave when they started drinking. In this way, she was taking care of herself and her family by not putting up with too much of the dysfunctional behavior of her family of origin.

Love is a choice. When we “have to” we are not making a choice, and not being Truly Loving. The most Loving thing we can do for ourselves in this emotionally charged time of the year is to see reality clearly and own our choices in deciding the best way to celebrate the Holiday. We can best honor the message of Love that Christmas symbolizes by being Loving to our self. (Which of course includes not judging yourself if you are spending time with them this year out of belief in “have to.” We need to become aware that it is okay to own our choices before we can make a choice. If this article is presenting you with a new concept, it is important not to judge yourself for your programming, for your codependency.)

“The key to healing our wounded souls is to get clear and honest in our emotional process. Until we can get clear and honest with our human emotional responses – until we change the twisted, distorted, negative perspectives and reactions to our human emotions that are a result of having been born into, and grown up in, a dysfunctional, emotionally repressive, Spiritually hostile environment – we cannot get clearly in touch with the level of emotional energy that is Truth. We cannot get clearly in touch with and reconnected to our Spiritual Self.

We, each and every one of us, has an inner channel to Truth, an inner channel to the Great Spirit. But that inner channel is blocked up with repressed emotional energy, and with twisted, distorted attitudes and false beliefs.”

“It can be relatively easy to access Love and Joy in relationship with nature. It is in our relationships with other people that it gets messy. That is because we learned how to relate to other people in childhood from wounded people who learned how to relate to other people in their childhood. In our core relationship with ourselves we don’t feel Lovable. That can make it very difficult to connect with other people in a clean and energetically clear way that helps us to access Love from the Source instead of viewing the other person as the source. We are so defended, because of the pain we have experienced, that we are not open to connecting with others. If we haven’t done the grief work from the past we are not open to feeling our feelings in the moment. As long as we are blocking the pain and anger and fear, we are also blocking the Love and Joy. The more we heal our emotional wounds and change our intellectual programming the more capacity we have to be in the moment and tune into the Love within.

(If you have not already read part 3 you may wish to do so before reading part 4 – all internal links in this column/web page/blog will open in a new browser window so that you can read them and then be back at this column when you collapse the window.)

As I say in the quote above from the last column in this series, relating to nature is easy – relating to other people is messy. That is because we did not learn how to have a healthy relationship with ourselves in early childhood. We have to clear up our relationship with our self in order to see our self clearly before we can start to see our relationship to other humans clearly.

And I want to make a point right at the beginning of this article that this is a gradual process of finding a sense of balance – not an absolute destination. The language I have to use to describe this multi-leveled, multi-faceted growth process is very limiting.

“Unfortunately, in sharing this information I am forced to use language that is polarized – that is black and white.

When I say that you cannot Truly Love others unless you Love yourself – that does not mean that you have to completely Love yourself first before you can start to Love others. The way the process works is that every time we learn to Love and accept ourselves a little tiny bit more, we also gain the capacity to Love and accept others a little tiny bit more.

When I say that you cannot start to access intuitive Truth until you clear out your inner channel – I am not saying that you have to complete your healing process before you can start getting messages. You can start getting messages as soon as you are willing to start listening. The more you heal the clearer the messages become.”

So, with that qualification about the limitations of language, I am now going to try to communicate as clearly as possible how clearing our relationship with ourselves can help us to be energetically clear in our relationship with other people and with life.

Giving power away

Many of the expressions that are in common usage in the language of human interrelationship are incredibly accurate on multiple levels. One such expression is ‘giving your power away.’ If we are not clear in our relationship with self, if we are reacting to the definitions of self that we learned in childhood, then we are giving power away both literally and figuratively on multiple levels.

The level that most people are not aware of, and that is important for the focus of this column, is energetically. When we give power away to other people because our relationship with self is dysfunctional, we actually allow cords of energy to tie us to those people. These cords (ribbons, cables, tethers, threads, strands) of energy exist on the Etheric plane – which is where the Life Force energy runs through the chakra system.

We can literally be drained of our Life Force by these dysfunctional connections to other people. All of us learned to allow ourselves to both be drained of Life Force by others as well as to steal Life Force energy from others to survive.

We need to steal Life Force energy from others because we are blocked from clearly accessing our own Life Force energy by our dysfunctional relationship with self. Because our inner channel is not clear. In clearing up our inner channel to tune into the higher vibrational emotional energy of Light, Love, Joy, and Truth, we are also accessing our own Life Force energy. (The Life Force energy and the vibrational range of Light, Love, Joy, Truth, and Beauty are not the same thing but they are intimately interrelated.)

So, when I talk about giving our power away on an energetic level, it is an actual drain of energy, of power. Our codependence/ego defense system is set up to help us survive by trying to keep us from being drained of power at the same time it tries to steal energy from outside sources. Since we cannot clearly access the Source energy we have available to us to within, we look externally for sources of power and energy.

Codependency is outer or external dependence. We are dependent on outer or external sources to feed us the energy we need to survive. We make people, places, and things and/or money, property and prestige the Higher Power that we look to as the source of our energy, our power.

We are attached to those things literally on an energetic level by the cords of energy that are created on the Etheric plane due to the relationship between the bodies of our being that exist on that plane – which includes our mental and emotional bodies.

(I am now going to use a quote from my Trilogy, and again a little later in this column a continuation of this quote as well as a quote from another article, that are part of my Joy2MeU Journal and are only available to subscribers of that Journal. I apologize for that to all of you that are not subscribers. This is not an attempt to get you to subscribe – although it would certainly be OK if you decided to do that – it is just the best way I can find to facilitate communicating what I am attempting to communicate here. For those of you who are not subscribers, there is plenty of material on this web site to focus on that will help you clear up your relationship with your self without having to understand the more metaphysical aspects of this life experience. In fact, many people focus on the metaphysical aspects as a way of avoiding doing the emotional healing – so sometimes it is best not to get too caught up in the metaphysical.)

“The holographic illusion which is the Physical plane is composed of multiple levels of illusions. The most basic illusion within the Physical plane is that substance and separation exist. They do not. Everything in the physical universe is composed of energy. This energy interacts to form energy fields. These energy fields interact according to energy patterns to form other energy fields, which in turn interact according to energy patterns to form other energy fields, which in turn interact….etc., etc. The interaction of the One energy produces energy fields on the sub-subatomic level. These energy fields interact to produce subatomic energy fields, which in turn combine/interact to produce the energy field that we call the atom. (Remember energy fields are formed by energy vortex interaction, and atoms are are little bundles of swirling energy.) These atoms interact/combine to form the energy field that is the molecule. Molecular energy fields interact to form every type of substance/matter which humans perceive.

All energy fields are temporary effects of energy vortex interaction. (Temporary is a relative term. Physicists measure the lifetime of some subatomic particles/energy fields in quintillionths of a seconds, while the planet Earth has existed for billions of years – both are temporary.) The energy patterns which govern these interactions are also energy fields in and of themselves. For example – the individual human mind is an energy field, but it is also an energy pattern that governs the flow of communications between a humans’ Spiritual being and physical being, and within the seven bodies which make up the humans’ being. (The seven bodies and the mind will be discussed later. Note that attitudes in the mind can block the flow of communication from the Soul because the mind is an energy pattern.)

Each energy field vibrates at certain frequencies, and is interrelated and interdependent with all other energy fields. Each letter in this sentence is an energy field composed of energy fields vibrating at certain frequencies, each combination of letters that forms a word, each combination of words that forms a sentence, etc., etc., etc. (Millions of atoms can go into making up a single letter – aren’t you glad you asked.) Each word, each concept, each idea, is an energy field interacting according to energy patterns that are energy fields.

(Get the point? The bottom line is that nothing is what it appears to be. You are made up of the same subatomic, atomic, and molecular energy as the chair you are sitting in and the air you are breathing. Just bring to consciousness for a moment the fact that your physical body vehicle is composed of an uncountable number of energy fields interacting according to energy patterns. Just to imagine the number of energy fields interacting within your physical body at this moment is overwhelming. Now think of the number of energy fields and energy patterns that come into play when dealing with something outside of yourself, and then of course there is your emotional body and your mental body, etc. – and you wonder why relationships are so hard.)” – The Dance of the Wounded Souls Trilogy Book 1 – “In The Beginning . . .” History of the Universe Part V

The fact that the mind is an energy field that is also an energy pattern of interaction is very important to realize. Communication from within (both internally between different parts of our being and from our spirit/Soul/Higher Power) and without – stimulation from our environment and everything/everyone in it – flows through the energy field that is the mind to our being.

Our experiential reality is determined by the interpretations of our mind – by the intellectual paradigm which we are using to define / determine / translate / explain our reality. The attitudes, definitions, and belief systems which we hold mentally dictate our emotional reactions. Attitudes, definitions, and beliefs determine perspective and expectation – which in turn dictates our relationships. Our relationships to our self, to life, to other people, to The God-Force / Goddess Energy / Great Spirit. Our relationships to our own emotions, bodies, gender, etc., are dictated by the attitudes, definitions, and beliefs that we are holding mentally / intellectually. And we acquired those mental constructs / ideas / concepts in early childhood from the emotional experiences, intellectual teachings, and role modeling of the beings around us. If we have not done our emotional healing so that we can get in touch with our subconscious intellectual programming then we are still reacting to that early childhood programming / intellectual paradigm even though we may not be aware of it consciously.

“The Truth is that the intellectual value systems, the attitudes, that we use in deciding what’s right and wrong were not ours in the first place. We accepted on a subconscious and emotional level the values that were imposed on us as children. Even if we throw out those attitudes and beliefs intellectually as adults, they still dictate our emotional reactions. Even if, especially if, we live our lives rebelling against them. By going to either extreme – accepting them without question or rejecting them without consideration – we are giving power away.”

“It was impossible to start Loving myself and trusting myself, impossible to start finding some peace within, until I started to change my perspective of, and my definitions of, who I was and what emotions it was okay for me to feel.

Enlarging my perspective means changing my definitions, the definitions that were imposed on me as a child about who I am and how to do this life business. In Recovery it has been necessary to change my definitions of, and my perspective of, almost everything. That was the only way that it was possible to start learning how to Love myself.

I spent most of my life feeling like I was being punished because I was taught that God was punishing and that I was unworthy and deserved to be punished. I had thrown out those beliefs about God and life on a conscious, intellectual level in my late teens – but in Recovery I was horrified to discover that I was still reacting to life emotionally based on those beliefs.

I realized that my perspective of life was being determined by beliefs that I had been taught as a child even though they were not what I believed as an adult.”

“I went home to do some writing and was pretty amazed at what it revealed. I realized that I was still reacting to life out of the religious programming of my childhood – even though I had thrown out that belief system on a conscious, intellectual level in my late teens and early twenties. The writing that I did that night helped me to recognize that my emotional programming was dictating my relationship with life even though it was not what I consciously believed.

I realized that the belief that “life was about sin and punishment and I was a sinner who deserved to be punished” was running my life. When I felt “bad” or “bad” things happened to me – I tried to blame it on others to keep from realizing how much I was hating myself for being flawed and defective, a sinner. When I felt good or good things happened I was holding my breath because I knew it would be taken away because I didn’t deserve it. Often when things got too good I would sabotage it because I couldn’t stand the suspense of waiting for god to take it away – which “he” would because I didn’t deserve it.

I could suddenly see that I had been playing a game, with that punishing god I learned about in childhood, for all of my adult life. I tried not to show that I enjoyed or valued anything too much so that maybe god wouldn’t notice and take it away. In other words, I could never relax and be in the moment in Joy or peace because the moment I showed that I was enjoying life god would step in to punish me.” – Joy2MeU Journal Premier issue The Story of “Joy to You & Me”

We cannot get clearly in touch with the subconscious programming without doing the grief work. The subconscious intellectual programming is tied to the emotional wounds we suffered and many years of suppressing those feelings has also buried the attitudes, definitions, and beliefs that are connected to those emotional wounds. It is possible to get intellectually aware of some of them through such tools as hypnosis, or having a therapist or psychic or energy healer tell us they are there – but we cannot really understand how much power they carry without feeling the emotional context – and cannot change them without reducing the emotional charge / releasing the emotional energy tied to them. Knowing they are there will not make them go away.

A good example of how this works is a man that I worked with some years ago. He came to me in emotional agony because his wife was leaving him. He was adamant that he did not want a divorce and kept saying how much he loved his wife and how he could not stand to lose his family (he had a daughter about 4.) I told him the first day he came in that the pain he was suffering did not really have that much to do with his wife and present situation – but was rooted in some attitude from his childhood. But that did not mean anything to him on a practical level, on a level of being able to let go of the attitude that was causing him so much pain. It was only while doing his childhood grief work that he got in touch with the pain of his parents divorce when he was 10 years old. In the midst of doing that grief work the memory of promising himself that he would never get a divorce, and cause his child the kind of pain he was experiencing, surfaced. Once he had gotten in touch with, and released, the emotional charge connected to the idea of divorce, he was able to look at his present situation more clearly. Then he could see that the marriage had never been a good one – that he had sacrificed himself and his own needs from the beginning to comply with his dream / concept of what a marriage should be. He could then see that staying in the marriage was not serving him or his daughter. Once he got past the promise he made to himself in childhood, he was able to let go of his wife and start building a solid relationship with his daughter based on the reality of today instead of the grief of the past.

It was the idea / concept of his wife, of marriage, that he had been unable to let go of – not the actual person. By changing his intellectual concept / belief, he was able to get clear on what the reality of the situation was and sever the emotional energy chains / cords that bound him to the situation and to his wife. He was then able to let go of giving away power over his self-esteem (part of his self-esteem was based on keeping his promise to himself) to a situation / person that he could not control. He gained the wisdom / clarity to discern the difference between what he had some power to change and what he needed to accept. He could not change his wife’s determination to get a divorce but he could change his attitude toward that divorce – once he changed the subconscious emotional programming connected to the concept.

Falling in love with a dream

It is letting go of the dream, the idea / concept, of the relationship that causes the most grief in every relationship break up that I have ever worked with. We give power and energy to the mental construct of what we want the relationship to be and cannot even begin to see the situation and the other person clearly.

Far too often – because of the concept of toxic / addictive love we are taught in this society – it is the idea of the other person that we fall in love with, not the actual person. It is so important to us to cast someone in the role of Prince or Princess that we focus on who we want them to be – not on who they really are. In our relationship with our self, we attach so much importance to getting the relationship that we are dishonest with ourselves – and with the other person – in order to manifest the dream / concept of relationship that will fix us / make our life worthwhile. Then we end up feeling like a victim when the other person does not turn out to be the person we wanted.

“A white knight is not going to come charging up to rescue us from the dragon. A princess is not going to kiss us and turn us from a frog into a prince. The Prince and the Princess and the Dragon are all within us. It is not about someone outside of us rescuing us. It is also not about some dragon outside of us blocking our path. As long as we are looking outside to become whole we are setting ourselves up to be victims. As long as we are looking outside for the villain we are buying into the belief that we are the victim.

As little kids we were victims and we need to heal those wounds. But as adults we are volunteers – victims only of our disease. The people in our lives are actors and actresses whom we cast in the roles that would recreate the childhood dynamics of abuse and abandonment, betrayal and deprivation.”

The attitude / dream / concept that has all the power is internal – it is not really about the other person. All of our emotional responses to life are based upon an internal relationship with our own intellectual paradigm / belief system / definitions. Other people are actually actors that we cast in the roles of the movie that we are projecting from our own mind. The foundation for what kind of movie we are making was laid in childhood due to our emotional wounds. If we want to change the quality of the movie, we need to get to the subconscious attitudes by grieving / clearing the emotional energy. Then we can change the music we are dancing to in our relationship with life and with other people.

Now, you have probably noticed that I have shifted from the metaphysical level back down to the practical level here – I am sorry if this is confusing. It can be difficult to speak about multiple levels simultaneously, but I find it necessary because it is so important to actually do the healing and not just get caught up in the intellectual gymnastics of trying to figure it all out.

The real point that I am trying to make here is that the healing process is an inside job. No one outside of you can drain you of energy, or exert power over you, unless it fits into the intellectual paradigm that your emotional wounds have set you up for. The cords / chains / threads of energy that connect us to other people connect us because of our beliefs. By changing the beliefs we can disconnect from the unhealthy linkage we have to other people. We can then learn how to connect energetically in ways that are healthy and Loving – We can learn the difference between healthy interdependence (which involves giving some power away over our feelings) and codependence.

“Codependence and interdependence are two very different dynamics.

Codependence is about giving away power over our self-esteem. . . . Interdependence is about making allies, forming partnerships. It is about forming connections with other beings. Interdependence means that we give someone else some power over our welfare and our feelings.

Anytime we care about somebody or something we give away some power over our feelings. It is impossible to Love without giving away some power. When we choose to Love someone (or thing – a pet, a car, anything) we are giving them the power to make us happy – we cannot do that without also giving them the power to hurt us or cause us to feel angry or scared.

In order to live we need to be interdependent. We cannot participate in life without giving away some power over our feelings and our welfare. I am not talking here just about people. If we put money in a bank we are giving some power over our feelings and welfare to that bank. If we have a car we have a dependence on it and will have feelings if it something happens to it. If we live in society we have to be interdependent to some extent and give some power away. The key is to be conscious in our choices and own responsibility for the consequences.

The way to healthy interdependence is to be able to see things clearly – to see people, situations, life dynamics and most of all ourselves clearly. If we are not working on healing our childhood wounds and changing our childhood programming then we cannot begin to see ourselves clearly let alone anything else in life. ” – Codependence vs. Interdependence

We can have healthy ties / threads / cords of energy connecting us to other people but only by learning to see ourselves clearly. As long as our self definition is enmeshed with other people’s attitudes and behaviors, we are incapable of making True choices about our own best interests. Until we start seeing ourselves clearly, we will continue to be energetically drawn to people who will recreate our childhood emotional wounds.

“3. Our emotions tell us who we are – our Soul communicates with us through emotional energy vibrations. Truth is an emotional energy vibrational communication from our Soul on the Spiritual Plane to our being/spirit/soul on this physical plane – it is something that we feel in our heart/our gut, something that resonates within us.

Our problem has been that because of our unhealed childhood wounds it has been very difficult to tell the difference between an intuitive emotional Truth and the emotional truth that comes from our childhood wounds. When one of our buttons is pushed and we react out of the insecure, scared little kid inside of us (or the angry/rage filled kid, or the powerless/helpless kid, etc.) then we are reacting to what our emotional truth was when we were 5 or 9 or 14 – not to what is happening now. Since we have been doing that all of our lives, we learned not to trust our emotional reactions (and got the message not to trust them in a variety of ways when we were kids.)

4. We are attracted to people that feel familiar on an energetic level – which means (until we start clearing our emotional process) people that emotionally / vibrationally feel like our parents did when we were very little kids. At a certain point in my process I realized that if I met a woman who felt like my soul mate, that the chances were pretty huge that she was one more unavailable woman that fit my pattern of being attracted to someone who would reinforce the message that I wasn’t good enough, that I was unlovable. Until we start releasing the hurt, sadness, rage, shame, terror – the emotional grief energy – from our childhoods we will keep having dysfunctional relationships.” – Feeling the Feelings

It does not make any difference what our conscious intellectual beliefs are as long as we are reacting energetically to old programming. That is why it is so vital to do the emotional healing. In order to clear our emotional body of the repressed emotional energy so that we can change the intellectual paradigm that is embedded in our mental body / mind, it is necessary to do the emotional healing. All of the intellectual knowledge of Spiritual Truth and healthy relationship behavior that we can acquire will not significantly transform the behavioral patterns that are being driven by the subconscious programming. We cannot heal our fear of intimacy so that we can open up to receiving Love without feeling the feelings.

“This grieving is not an intellectual process. Changing our false and dysfunctional attitudes is vital to the process; enlarging our intellectual perspective is absolutely necessary to the process, but doing these things does not release the energy – it does not heal the wounds.

Learning what healthy behavior is will allow us to be healthier in the relationships that do not mean much to us; intellectually knowing Spiritual Truth will allow us to be more Loving some of the time; but in the relationships that mean the most to us, with the people we care the most about, when our “buttons are pushed” we will watch ourselves saying things we don’t want to say and reacting in ways that we don’t want to react – because we are powerless to change the behavior patterns without dealing with the emotional wounds.

We cannot integrate Spiritual Truth or intellectual knowledge of healthy behavior into our experience of life in a substantial way without honoring and respecting the emotions. We cannot consistently incorporate healthy behavior into day to day life without being emotionally honest with ourselves. We cannot get rid of our shame and overcome our fear of emotional intimacy without going through the feelings.

Walking around saying “We are all one,” and “God is Love,” and “I forgive them all,” does not release the energy. Using crystals, or white light, or being born again does not heal the wounds, and does not fundamentally alter the behaviors.

We are all ONE and God is LOVE; crystals do have power and white light is a very valuable tool, but we need to not confuse the intellectual with the emotional (forgiving someone intellectually does not make the energy of anger and pain disappear) – and to not kid ourselves that using the tools allows us to avoid the process.

There is no quick fix! Understanding the process does not replace going through it! There is no magic pill, there is no magic book, there is no guru or channeled entity that can make it possible to avoid the journey within, the journey through the feelings.

No one outside of Self (True, Spiritual Self) is going to magically heal us.

There is not going to be some alien E.T. landing in a spaceship singing, “Turn on your heart light,” who is going to magically heal us all.

The only one who can turn on your heart light is you.”

And, of course, the way we turn on our heart light is to tune into the energy, the power, of the Transcendent emotional energy of Love, Light, Joy, Truth, and Beauty. We need to open up to receiving Love – and we cannot do that without changing our relationship with the child who we were.

“It is necessary to own and honor the child who we were in order to Love the person we are. And the only way to do that is to own that child’s experiences, honor that child’s feelings, and release the emotional grief energy that we are still carrying around.”

“A “state of Grace” is the condition of being Loved unconditionally by our Creator without having to earn that Love. We are Loved unconditionally by the Great Spirit. What we need to do is to learn to accept that state of Grace.

The way we do that is to change the attitudes and beliefs within us that tell us that we are not Lovable. And we cannot do that without going through the black hole. The black hole that we need to surrender to traveling through is the black hole of our grief. The journey within – through our feelings – is the journey to knowing that we are Loved, that we are Lovable.”

The healing process is an inside job.

The relationship I need to heal is between me and me. Everything in my lesson plan / life experience is there for me to learn from so that I can heal my relationship with me. All the people who play a significant role in my life are teachers reflecting back to me some aspect of my relationship with my self – with my humanity, with my emotions, with my sexuality, with whatever – that needs healing. Through healing my relationship with me I am owning and honoring my connection to everything.

There is nothing wrong with who we are – it is our relationship to our self that is so messed up. We are all Spiritual Beings having a human experience. We all have Divine worth as children of The Source. We are all perfect parts of The Source. In our relationship with ourselves on this level we need to learn to open up to receiving the Love that is our True state of being – that is why we are here. To heal so that we can reconnect with Love.

I am going to have to put off talking about the details of energetic clarity in relationship and “how to differentiate between looking outside for the source and combining our energy with some outside influence to help us access the Source within” until my next column (this one is getting too long) in order to to make one point very clearly here. It was impossible for me to start to get clear energetically in my relationships with others and life until I started to have boundaries that told me where I ended and other people began. As long as I believed that I was responsible for other people’s feelings and behavior I could not start seeing myself clearly. As long as I was looking to other people for the juice / energy / power to feel OK about myself, I was set up to be a victim and recreate the old patterns.

This is The big paradigm shift. Shifting our intellectual paradigm – our attitudes, definitions, and beliefs – is necessary in order to raise our consciousness and open up to consciously accessing the Transcendent vibrational energy of Love, Light, Joy, and Truth. I had to stop looking outside for the answers and start accessing the Truth within. Only when I started to open up to the idea that perhaps, maybe, I was Lovable and worthy in a way that was not dependent on outside or external conditions, could I start to let go of defining myself in reaction to other people and other peoples belief systems.

In order to get clear on how to connect to others in a healthy way we must first realize and define how we are separate from others. On the level of our physical being, our ego-self, we are separate and need to own that before we can open up to consciously experiencing how we are connected to everyone and everything. We need to see our relationship with ourselves clearly in order to see our relationships to others clearly.

One of the things that I had to get clear on in order to start learning who I am was selfishness. I had been taught that it was bad to be selfish and that I should do things for others. I learned to steal energy from others through what I was telling myself were unselfish acts. I was just being a “nice guy” and did not expect anything in return – Bull. I always had expectations – I just was not being honest with myself about them – because I had been trained and conditioned in childhood to be dishonest with myself emotionally and intellectually.

I had to come to a realization that there is no such thing as an unselfish act. If I rescue a stranger from a burning car wreck, it does not have anything to do with the stranger – it has to do with my relationship with myself. I believe that every thing a human being does has a pay off – and it was a very important part of my growth process to start looking for those pay offs. I had to learn to get honest with myself and stop buying into the illusion that anything I did was for some one else. I had to stop looking outside for the energy boost I got from doing something nice so that I could own that the energy boost came internally.

The power / energy / juice that we need comes from within – not from outside. People, places, and things can sometimes help us to access the power that is within us – but they are not the source of that power. The source is within!

It has always come from within – we were just trained to look outside for it because of the reversity of the planets energy field of emotional consciousness has caused human beings to do human backwards. Codependence is a disease of reversed focus – looking externally for that which is available within us.

“Codependence is also a disease of reversed focus – it is about focusing outside of ourselves for self-definition and self-worth. That sets us up to be a victim. We have worth because we are Spiritual Beings not because of how much money or success we have – or how we look or how smart we are. When self-worth is determined by looking outside it means we have to look down on someone else to feel good about ourselves – this is the cause of bigotry, racism, class structure, and Jerry Springer.

The goal is to focus on who we really are – get in touch with the Light and Love within us and then radiate that outward. I think that is what Mother Theresa did – I can’t know for sure because I never met her and it can be difficult to tell looking from the outside where a persons focus is – Mother Theresa could have been a raging codependent who was doing good on the outside in order to feel good about herself – or she could have been being True to her Self by accessing the Love and Light within and reflecting outward. Either way the effect was that she did some great things – the difference would have been how she felt about herself at the deepest levels of her being – because it does not make any real difference how much validation we get from outside if we are not Loving ourselves. If I did not start working on knowing that I had worth as a Spiritual Being – that there is a Higher Power that Loves me – it would never have made any real difference how many people told me I was wonderful.” – Question & Answer Page 2

The relationship I need to heal is between me and me. Everything in my lesson plan / life experience is there for me to learn from so that I can heal my relationship with me (which will heal the Karma I need to settle.) All the people who play a significant role in my life are teachers reflecting back to me some aspect of my relationship with my self – with my humanity, with my emotions, with my sexuality, with whatever – that needs healing. Through healing my relationship with me I am owning and honoring my connection to everything.

There is nothing wrong with who we are – it is our relationship to our self that is messed up. We are all Spiritual Beings having a human experience. We all have Divine worth as children of The Source. We are all perfect parts of The Source. In our relationship with ourselves on this level we need to learn to open up to receiving / accessing the Love that is our True state of being – that is why we are here. To heal so that we can reconnect with Love.

We can have healthy ties / threads / cords of energy connecting us to other people but only by learning to see ourselves clearly. As long as our self definition is enmeshed with other people’s attitudes and behaviors, we are incapable of making True choices about our own best interests. Until we start seeing ourselves clearly, we will continue to be energetically drawn to people who will recreate our childhood emotional wounds.

“Both the classic codependent patterns and the classic counterdependent patterns are behavioral defenses, strategies, design to protect us from the devastating pain and debilitating shame of being abandoned because we are flawed, because we are not good enough, not worthy and lovable. One tries to protect against abandonment by avoiding confrontation and pleasing the other – while the second tries to avoid abandonment by pretending we don’t need anyone else. Both are dysfunctional and dishonest.” – Codependent Relationships Dynamics – Codependent & Counterdependent Behavior

On an energetic level, abandonment means getting unplugged from our energy source. Abandonment feels life-threatening because the cords that bind us to other people, and feed us Life Force energy, gets unplugged and we do not know how to access that energy for ourselves. That is why it is so important to learn to plug in internally, access the Transcendent emotional energy of Love, Light, Joy, and Truth that is available to us within.

It is very important for us to learn to let go of our unhealthy attachments to other people and outside sources so that we can access the power from the Source that is available within. Learning how to define ourselves as separate, how to have boundaries that tell us who we are as individuals, is a vital step in starting to see ourselves with more clarity so that we can see others and life with more clarity.

And once again here, I want to make the point that clarity with our self is not an absolute destination. This healing is a gradual process of finding a sense of balance – a sense of what clarity feels like, so that we can look for and recognize when we have it and when we do not. In order to do that it is vital to learn how to be emotionally honest with ourselves so that we can be discerning in our relationship with our own mental and emotional process. Through that honesty we will achieve some energetic clarity as well.

Through that energetic clarity we will be able to access Love from the Source – and we will learn to Love and trust our Self to guide our self through this boarding school that is life as a human.

Robert Burney is a pioneer in the area of codependency recovery / inner child healing. His first book Codependence The Dance of Wounded Souls has been called “one of the truly transformational works of our time.” It combines Twelve Step Recovery Principles, Metaphysical Truth, and Native American Spirituality with quantum physics and molecular biology in a Cosmic Perspective of Codependence & The Human Condition. It is possible to get personally autographed copies of his books from his main website Joy2MeU.comor from aMobile friendly site. You can also get Books, eBooks, and Audiobooks through Amazon: Books or eBooks from Barnes & Nobleor eBooks thru KoboHere is a page with special offers for his books.

His website Joy2MeU.com offers over 200 pages of free original contenton codependency recovery, inner child healing, relationship dynamics, alcoholism/addiction, fear of intimacy, Twelve Step Spirituality, New Age Metaphysics, emotional abuse, setting boundaries, grief process, and much more.The Joy2MeU website is designed in an ancient design program which is not mobile friendly.A new site – joy2meu2.com – is a redesign of joy2meu.com in a mobile friendly format. The Joy2MeU2siteindex page that will help you to access most of his articles on mobile friendly sites (around 170.)

“Truth, in my understanding, is not an intellectual concept. I believe that Truth is an emotional-energy, vibrational communication to my consciousness, to my soul/spirit – my being, from my Soul. Truth is an emotion, something that I feel within.

It is that feeling within when someone says, or writes, or sings, something in just the right words so that I suddenly feel a deeper understanding. It is that “AHA” feeling. The feeling of a light bulb going on in my head. That “Oh, I get it!” feeling. The intuitive feeling when something just feels right . . . or wrong. It’s that gut feeling, the feeling in my heart. It is the feeling of something resonating within me. The feeling of remembering something that I had forgotten – but do not remember ever knowing.”

When I first got into recovery at the beginning of 1984, I was confronted with the Twelve Step concept of a Loving Higher Power. It was a strange and foreign concept to me at the time. The concept of God that I was taught about when I was growing up was not a Loving Higher Power. There is no Unconditional Love involved with a god who could send his children to burn in hell forever – even as a child I knew there was something very wrong with that belief.

So, I set out to try to figure out a concept of God that I could believe in as an Unconditionally Loving Higher Power. In retrospect I can see that what I was doing was a paradigm shift – a shift to a larger context – that would allow me to change my relationship with God, with The Universe, into one that would work for me to help me want to live instead of wanting to kill myself. At the time I didn’t think in terms of relationship dynamics, I was just trying to find some reason to stay sober.

There were two memories that my initial search was based upon. One was the memory of how strongly I had resonated with the idea that “the Force is with you.” There was something that felt very True in that statement to me. The other was a thought that had come to me in certain moments of clarity in the midst of my darkest hours. That thought was: either there is a Loving Force/God behind this human life experience that I was having or there wasn’t. If there was, then everything had to be unfolding perfectly – with no accidents, coincidences, or mistakes. If there wasn’t – if there was no God Force, or God was punishing and judgmental – then I did not want to play anymore.

My intentional codependence recovery (that story here) started with the realization of how my relationship with life was being dictated by the concept of God I was taught about as a child – and still had programmed into my subconscious belief system – instead of what I was choosing to believe on a conscious, intellectual level. Focusing on changing that subconscious programming led me into healing the emotional wounds in which that programming was rooted. Healing the emotional wounds led me into doing deep grief work which I discovered involved releasing energy. The more I became clear that emotions were actual energy that needed to flow instead of being blocked, the easier it became for me to get in touch with my emotions and open up to healing them through energy release.

(Easier in terms of aligning with the way the process really works – not easier in terms of less painful. What I did learn, was that it was easier in the long run to feel and release the pain – and anger and fear – than to keep trying to stuff it.)

Thus, one piece of the puzzle fell into place. Emotions are energy. Energy has a vibrational frequency. Anger has a higher vibrational frequency than pain or fear – thus the human defense mechanism which allows us to turn pain or fear into anger because it is has more energy mass and therefore feels empowering instead of vulnerable and weak. Much of world history becomes clearer just by understanding how humans – as part of trying to survive – have reacted to fear and pain by getting angry and acting out that anger.

Quantum Physics

Another piece of the puzzle started to fall into place when I started to read books about quantum physics.

“One of the fascinating things about the Age of Healing and Joy that has dawned in human consciousness is that the tools and knowledge that we need to raise our consciousness, to awaken to consciousness, have been unfolding in all areas of human endeavor over time, and at an accelerated rate in the last fifty to one hundred years.

One of the most fascinating things to me, and a key in my personal healing process, is in the area of physics.

Physicists have now proven through Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and the study of quantum physics that everything we see is an illusion.

Einstein, in looking at a macroscopic perspective of the Universe, said in his Theory of Relativity that there are more than three dimensions. Human beings can only visualize in three dimensions. We can only see three dimensions so we have assumed that that is all there is.

Einstein also stated that time and space are not the absolute variables that science has traditionally believed them to be – that they are, in fact, a relative experience.

Quantum physics, the study of the microscopic, the subatomic world, has gone even further. Quantum physics has now proven that everything we see is an illusion, that the physical world is an illusion.

Everything is made up of interacting energy. Energy interacts on a subatomic level to form energy fields which physicists call subatomic particles. These subatomic energy fields interact to form atomic energy fields, atoms, which interact to form molecules. Everything in the physical world is made up of interacting atomic and molecular energy fields.

There is no such thing as separation in the physical world.

Energy is interacting to form a gigantic, dynamic pattern of rhythmically repeating energy interactions. In other words, a dance of energy. We are all part of a gigantic dance of energy.

This Universe is one gigantic pattern of dancing energy patterns.”

The Universe is one giant dance of energy. This realization led to the title of my book: The Dance of Wounded Souls. We are all dancing energy made up of dancing energy. I realized that the reason the dance was painful and dysfunctional is that humans have been dancing to the wrong music (wrong as in not aligned with the Truth of a Loving Force.) The dance of life for humans has been grounded in shame and fear, empowered by belief in separation, lack, and scarcity. These are lower vibrational emotions and beliefs based on the three dimensional illusion that humans experience as reality. As long as the dance of humans harmonizes to music – vibrational emanations – that are rooted in shame, fear, and separation the only way to do the dance is destructively.

As I did my deep grief work and started to clear up my internal process so that I could more clearly differentiate between Truth that was a vibrational communication from my Soul and the emotional truth that was coming from my wounded soul, I was able to start trusting myself to be able to discern Truth.

“Feelings are real – they are emotional energy that is manifested in our body – but they are not necessarily fact. What we feel is our “emotional truth” and it does not necessarily have anything to do with either facts or the emotional energy that is Truth with a capital “T” – especially when we our reacting out of an age of our inner child.”

“The key to healing our wounded souls is to get clear and honest in our emotional process. Until we can get clear and honest with our human emotional responses – until we change the twisted, distorted, negative perspectives and reactions to our human emotions that are a result of having been born into, and grown up in, a dysfunctional, emotionally repressive, Spiritually hostile environment – we cannot get clearly in touch with the level of emotional energy that is Truth. We cannot get clearly in touch with and reconnected to our Spiritual Self.

We, each and every one of us, has an inner channel to Truth, an inner channel to the Great Spirit. But that inner channel is blocked up with repressed emotional energy, and with twisted, distorted attitudes and false beliefs.”

I was able to have a more trusting and Loving relationship with myself through getting more in touch with my Spiritual Self, my Higher Self, and through that Higher Self with God as I was coming to understand God. I was able to start having a personal, intimate relationship with my own concept of a Higher Power / God / Goddess / Great Spirit. I learned to trust the vibrational communications, the feeling of something resonating within. I was studying Quantum Physics, Molecular Biology, religion, theology, philosophy, mythology, esoteric metaphysics, science fiction – whatever was brought into my path to study. In those studies I was sorting out the wheat from the chaff – I was picking out the nuggets of Truth from the twisted, distorted beliefs they were embedded within.

I started writing a book based on what I was learning. This book was the first book of a Trilogy that was an adult fable about the history of the Universe. In that book I wrote about different vibrational levels of reality. I was writing a mystical, magical fairy tale based on a belief system that made it possible to view life as fair and Loving from a Cosmic Perspective. The Higher Power in this belief system is so powerful that everything is unfolding perfectly, with no accidents, coincidences, or mistakes. And this Higher Power is unconditionally Loving because we are part of this Higher Power – not separate from it. We have never been separate from the God Force. Every human is just a little piece of the energy of ALL THAT IS which exists in perfect ONENESS because it vibrates at the frequency of Absolute Harmony that is LOVE.

We are extensions of, manifestations of, this Higher Power temporarily in human form experiencing life in a lower vibrational illusion of three dimensional reality. We are Spiritual Beings having a human experience – not sinful, shameful humans who have to earn the Love of the Source. We are here to experience being human – to go through the school of Spiritual Evolution.

“Spiritual Evolution is the process whereby the energy of ALL THAT IS gets to experience every aspect of the illusion of existence at vibrational frequencies lower than the frequency of LOVE. Existence at the lower vibrational frequencies is experienced by energy fields of consciousness known as Souls. These Souls exist on the Spiritual Plane within the illusion. The Spiritual Plane is the highest vibrational plane, that is the vibrational plane which exists closest to the Reality of ONENESS at LOVE. It is on the Spiritual Plane that the highest vibrational frequency range naturally available to human experience is generated (by the Souls). This frequency range is the transcendent Emotional energy of Love. This Love frequency range also contains frequencies which are experienced as Truth, Joy, Beauty, and Light as well as sometimes being called; the God within, the Goddess within, the Christ within, The Holy Spirit, etc.

It is this Love frequency that is the Light that guides the energy of ALL THAT IS through the school of Spiritual Evolution. For the Soul on the Spiritual Plane projects/extends downward vibrationally to manifest the soul/Ego which exists on the Mental plane within the Temporal Plane. It is the soul/Ego which experiences the illusion of separate, unique, individual identity and projects forth (downward vibrationally) the energy field of the soul/spirit/ego which actually inhabits the human body vehicle.”

In this Trilogy, I found a belief system that allowed me to believe that maybe I wasn’t shameful – that maybe I was Lovable. As I was writing this book, I was also doing individual therapy with people. I was teaching them how to do the grief work to change their relationship with themselves and life. I saw the Trilogy as separate from the nitty gritty inner work – until they came together. The belief system I was writing about from a Cosmic Perspective of the Human Experience suddenly meshed perfectly with the inner child work that I was teaching people and learning myself. It was perfect. It all fit together. From that coalescing of the human emotional process with the Cosmic Perspective of life came my book The Dance of Wounded Souls.

Codependence is a reflection on the individual level of the original wound of humankind – feeling abandoned by God. Feeling unlovable and unworthy and somehow shameful because of feeling separate from The Source. We are not separate from the Source – it just feels like it.

“The Universal Creative Force, as I understand it, is the energy field of ALL THAT IS vibrating at the frequency of Absolute Harmony. That vibrational frequency I call LOVE. (LOVE is the vibrational frequency of God; Love is an energy vibration within The Illusion which we can access; love is, in our Codependent culture, most often an addiction or an excuse for dysfunctional behavior.)

LOVE is the energy frequency of Absolute Harmony because it is the vibrational frequency where there is no separation.

Energy moves in wave-like patterns; what enables movement is the separation between the valley of the wave and its peak. The distance from peak to peak is called it’s wavelength. It is a law of physics that as vibrational frequency rises, as it gets higher, the wavelength gets shorter. The frequency of LOVE is the vibrational frequency where wavelength disappears, where separation disappears.

It is a place of absolute Peace, motionless, timeless, completely at rest: The Eternal Now.

The Peace and Bliss of The Eternal Now is the True Absolute Reality of the God-Force.”

Love is a vibrational frequency. It is our direct channel to The Source. When we can tune into that higher energy vibration we are closer to our True Selves. In The Goddess we are LOVE. LOVE is home. Humans have never felt comfortable in this lower vibrational illusion – we know from a very early age that something is wrong with this place. So we try to alter our consciousness – to raise our vibrational frequency.

It is not bad or wrong that you are an alcoholic or drug addict or workaholic or love addict or food addict or whatever – it is just an attempt to go home. We have felt lost and alone and not a part of – and we did whatever we could to try to transform that painful level of consciousness into a higher level. The problem was that those outside means of altering our consciousness are temporary, artificial, and self-destructive. When we look to outer or external sources that interfere with consciousness to alter our consciousness, to make us feel better, we are worshipping false gods, we are giving power to the illusion – we are not owning our True Self and our own inner channel to God.

Now that does not mean there is anything wrong with outer stimulation helping us to access Love. What is dysfunctional is focusing on the outer or external as the source of the Joy. We can combine our energy with a place or a person or a group of people or an animal to form a more powerful energy field which makes it easier to access the higher vibrational Source energy. What outer or external sources can do is reflect back to us the Beauty of who we really are – that is a most powerful way of accessing the Love within ourselves.

We all can do it at times. The easiest place for many of us to access this Love energy is in nature. Watching a beautiful sunset or looking out over a magnificent landscape can make it easy to access the vibrational frequency of Love, Light, Truth, Beauty, and Joy. Small children can help many of us to tune into the Love within us. Music, or other vibrational emanations such as chanting or meditation or movement, can also facilitate this connection. Perhaps in your relationship to your dog or cat or horse, you can find the space to tune into the Love within.

What all of these things – from babies to whales to dancing – have in common is that they help us to be in the moment. It is in the moment that we can access the Love vibrational frequency within us.

It can be relatively easy to access Love and Joy in relationship with nature. It is in our relationships with other people that it gets messy. That is because we learned how to relate to other people in childhood from wounded people who learned how to relate to other people in their childhood. In our core relationship with ourselves we don’t feel Lovable. That can make it very difficult to connect with other people in a clean and energetically clear way that helps us to access Love from the Source instead of viewing the other person as the source. We are so defended, because of the pain we have experienced, that we are not open to connecting with others. If we haven’t done the grief work from the past we are not open to feeling our feelings in the moment. As long as we are blocking the pain and anger and fear, we are also blocking the Love and Joy. The more we heal our emotional wounds and change our intellectual programming the more capacity we have to be in the moment and tune into the Love within.

I will discuss further in the next column in this series, how to differentiate between looking outside for the source and combining our energy with some outside influence to help us access the Source within. In the meantime, try whenever you think of it to be in the moment. Take a deep breath, let go of tomorrow and yesterday, and see if you can’t find something in your environment that will help you to tune into the Love energy within you. This is a new age – The Age of Healing & Joy – and we have greater access to the transcendent emotional energy than ever before in recorded human history. It Truly is a time for Joy. A time to change the dance from one of suffering and endurance into one that celebrates the gift of life.

“What is so wonderful, what is so Joyous and exciting, is that we now have clearer access to our Spiritual Higher Consciousness than ever before in recorded human history. And through that Higher Self to the Universal Creative God-Force.

Each and every one of us has an inner channel. We now have the capability to atone – which means tune into – to atone, to tune into the Higher Consciousness. To tune into the Higher vibrational emotional energies that are Joy, Light, Truth, Beauty, and Love.

We can tune into the Truth of “at ONE ness.” Atone = at ONE. Atonement = at ONE ment, in a condition of ONENESS.

We now have access to the highest vibrational frequencies – we can tune into the Truth of ONENESS. By aligning with Truth we are tuning into the higher energy vibrations that reconnect us with the Truth of ONENESS.

This is the age of atonement, but it does not have anything to do with judgment and punishment. It has to do with tuning our inner channel into the right frequencies.

But our inner channel is blocked and cluttered with repressed emotional energy and dysfunctional attitudes. The more we clear our inner channel through aligning with Truth attitudinally, and releasing the repressed emotional energy through the grief process, the clearer we can tune into the music of Love and Joy, Light and Truth.”

Robert Burney is a pioneer in the area of codependency recovery / inner child healing. His first book Codependence The Dance of Wounded Souls has been called “one of the truly transformational works of our time.” It combines Twelve Step Recovery Principles, Metaphysical Truth, and Native American Spirituality with quantum physics and molecular biology in a Cosmic Perspective of Codependence & The Human Condition. It is possible to get personally autographed copies of his books from his main website Joy2MeU.comor from aMobile friendly site. You can also get Books, eBooks, and Audiobooks through Amazon: Books or eBooks from Barnes & Nobleor eBooks thru KoboHere is a page with special offers for his books.

His website Joy2MeU.com offers over 200 pages of free original contenton codependency recovery, inner child healing, relationship dynamics, alcoholism/addiction, fear of intimacy, Twelve Step Spirituality, New Age Metaphysics, emotional abuse, setting boundaries, grief process, and much more.The Joy2MeU website is designed in an ancient design program which is not mobile friendly.A new site – joy2meu2.com – is a redesign of joy2meu.com in a mobile friendly format. The Joy2MeU2siteindex page that will help you to access most of his articles on mobile friendly sites (around 170.)

“The Universal Creative Force, as I understand it, is the energy field of ALL THAT IS vibrating at the frequency of Absolute Harmony. That vibrational frequency I call LOVE. (LOVE is the vibrational frequency of God; Love is an energy vibration within The Illusion which we can access; love is, in our Codependent culture, most often an addiction or an excuse for dysfunctional behavior.)

LOVE is the energy frequency of Absolute Harmony because it is the vibrational frequency where there is no separation.

Energy moves in wave-like patterns; what enables movement is the separation between the valley of the wave and its peak. The distance from peak to peak is called it’s wavelength. It is a law of physics that as vibrational frequency rises, as it gets higher, the wavelength gets shorter. The frequency of LOVE is the vibrational frequency where wavelength disappears, where separation disappears.

It is a place of absolute Peace, motionless, timeless, completely at rest: The Eternal Now.

The Peace and Bliss of The Eternal Now is the True Absolute Reality of the God-Force.”

What is Love? That is the question. I have been quite balled up the last week in attempting to write this column. No, that is not quite true – I have been unable to get into a space to even attempt to write this column. I need to get into a certain space – need to be feeling a special kind of creative energy – to write about a topic such as this. It was much easier to write last month’s column about “what Love is not.” Then I was writing about something much more concrete, much more black and white (the irony of this – since one of the characteristics of the disease is black and white thinking – is fodder for a completely different column.) The dynamics of the disease and the wounding process are very clear in my eyes. I have experienced the type of love that is shaming, abusive, manipulative, smothering, intrusive, addictive, etc., my whole life.

In fact, I learned a new word while writing this column. As I was composing the above paragraph, and taking note of how much easier it was to write last month’s column, the word empirical came to mind.

So, I did what comes naturally when a word pops to mind – I looked it up.

empirical 1. Relating to or based on experience or observation. 2. Relying entirely or to excess upon direct, repeated, and uncritically accepted experience: opposed to metempirical.

Aha, a new word.

metempirical 1. Lying beyond the bounds of experience, as intuitive principles; not derived from experience; transcendental.

So, even though I just said that it was easier to write ‘what Love is not’ because of my experience – in Truth when I say that Love is not shaming and abusive, I am actually stating my intuitive Truth. If I were just relying on my experience, I would say “love is shaming and abusive and controlling,” “love is being responsible for other people’s feelings and well being,” etc. – and that would be the Truth about love with a small l. When I say Love is not shaming, I am talking about the True Nature of Love as I intuitively understand it. Once I started to awaken to the reality that civilized society on this planet was based upon some false beliefs, then I started to be able to validate my intuitive feeling that something was dreadfully wrong here. I Knew deep inside, from a very young age, that this was not my home. I Knew that Love, if it was really such a wonderful thing, should not be so painful – just as I Knew it was ridiculous for both sides in a war to think that God was on their side and would help them kill the enemy.

Love that is Freedom

I could feel that Love must be something much greater than I had learned growing up. If Love is so wonderful, if Love is the answer – then Love should set us Free. That is what is coming up as I write this column – Love that is Freedom. Love that is Joy. Love that is the only Truth that has ever mattered.

Love that is Freedom – what does that mean? To me it means the Freedom to be OK with being me. The Freedom to relax and enJoy the moment. The Freedom to be – just be, without having to strive, to work for, to try to reach, to prove myself, to earn Love, to get “there.”

It means: Freedom from shame. Freedom from judgment. Freedom from loneliness. Freedom from feeling separate, different, not a part of, not acceptable. Freedom from the endless, aching longing for something more. Freedom from the hole in my soul – from the bottomless abyss of pain and shame and sadness that I feel at the core of my being.

This place is not my home. When I yearn for Love, I am longing to go home.

“I was ‘transported with Joy’, and my ‘spirit was soaring’, as I danced on the rock. And in my dancing and singing I Truly understood what those expressions meant. For in being ‘transported’ and ‘soaring’ I was merely tuning into the vibrational frequency that is Joy and Love and Truth. I could see clearly now how human beings throughout history had been trying to tune into Love. The primal urge that has caused humans to attempt to ‘alter their consciousness’, through drugs or religion or food or meditation or whatever, is no more than an attempt to raise one’s vibrational frequency. All any soul in body has ever done is to try to return home to God – we were just doing it all backwards because of the reversity of the planets energy field.” – The Dance of The Wounded Souls Trilogy Book 1 “In The Beginning . . . “ (Chapter 4)

“Humans have always been looking for a way home. For a way to connect with our Higher Consciousness. For a way to reconnect with our creator. Throughout human history, human beings have used temporary artificial means to raise their vibrational level, to try to reconnect with Higher Consciousness.

Drugs and alcohol, meditation and exercise, sex and religion, starvation and overeating, the self-torture of the flagellant or the deprivation of the hermit – all are attempts to connect with higher consciousness. Attempts to reconnect with Spiritual Self. Attempts to go home.”

Part of the reason that I have had trouble in writing this column is because of the intellectual context I was approaching it from. I was thinking that I had to know what I was talking about, had to be able to communicate to you the Truth about Love. That was pretty silly of me.* Love is what I am learning about. Love is what recovery and healing are all about. Love is the goal. Love is home.

*[Actually, it was my disease at work – causing me to judge and shame myself for not feeling competent to write about the True Nature of Love. This disease of codependence is so incredibly insidious, treacherous, and powerful. It continually turns back in on itself. The disease doesn’t want me to take the risk of Loving and trusting my self and then it turns around and causes me to judge myself because I don’t Love my self. I don’t Love myself because of the disease – the ego programming that is a result of being wounded and traumatized by being Spiritually orphaned in an alien environment. By being born into and raised in an emotionally dishonest and dysfunctional, Spiritually hostile, shame based, Love mutilated (mutilate – 1. To deprive of a limb or essential part. 2. To damage or injure by the removal of an important part.) civilization on a planet where civilized societies have evolved based on the belief in separation and fear-based hostility – separation between beings, separation between humans and their environment, and separation between the flesh and the Spirit. The civilization I was raised in is so sick and twisted that it took the teachings of the Master Teacher who came into body to teach us about Love and twisted those teachings into something shameful and hate-filled. Jesus Christ carried a message of Love – not shame and judgment.]

“Due to the planetary conditions, the human ego developed a belief in separation – which is what made violence possible and caused the human condition as we inherited it. The reflection of that human condition on the individual level is the disease of Codependence. Codependence is caused by the ego being traumatized and programed in early childhood so that our relationship with ourselves and the God-Force is dysfunctional – that is, it does not work to help us access the Truth of ONENESS and Love. It is through healing our relationship with ourselves that we open our inner channel and start tuning into the Truth.” – Jesus & Christ Consciousness

Now what I thought last month was going to be one column about the True Nature of Love has turned into at least a 4 part series. In dealing with the shame I was feeling about not knowing enough about Love to write about it’s True Nature, I have in fact been processing through that shame to get to a place where I can be free to write about the type of Love that can set me Free. So, I will save “Love as a vibrational frequency” and “Love and romance” for future columns.

I have only a little experience with feeling Love that sets me Free – and that has come primarily since I have been in recovery. In those moments when I am able to connect with Love in it’s True form, then I feel that all of the pain and suffering has been worth the experience. Then I get a taste of what home really feels like. Then I get to feel the Joy and Truth and Love that Truly does set me Free from the illusion of separation. In those moments, I can sometimes even feel grateful for that illusion. Because without the illusion of separation from The Source Energy, from Love – I would never have gotten the opportunity to experience Love.

I am going to end this column with a continuation of the quote from my book “The Dance of Wounded Souls” which I started it with. This quote is from the very end of my book. This is my intuitive Truth. This is an important part of the understanding which has led to the beginning of my liberation from the shame. This Truth has helped me to start Loving myself a little bit – to start Loving myself enough to be Free to start believing that maybe, just maybe I am Lovable and Loved.

“The Peace and Bliss of The Eternal Now is the True Absolute Reality of the God-Force.

The illusion of separation – the distance, the separation, between the peak and the valley – is what makes motion possible. Separation is necessary for energy to be in motion. The illusion of separation was necessary to create The Illusion.

As part of the ONENESS of ALL THAT IS, we are God and God is LOVE. We are part of the Truth of ONENESS vibrating at LOVE. As part of the ONENESS of LOVE we would never have been able to experience Love. It is kind of like, “If you are sugar then you never get to taste sugar.”

In God we are LOVE. Without the illusion of separation we would never have had the opportunity to experience Love. Would never have been able to Love and be Loved.

Separation was necessary to allow us the incredible gift of experiencing Love, of Loving and being Loved.

The Illusion that caused all of the pain is also the vehicle for allowing us to feel and be Loved.

If you pursue your path of healing, I think that you will find as I have that it is very much worth it. It is worth it to be able to experience Love.

This is the Age of Healing and Joy. It is time to start remembering who you Truly are, to start feeling and tuning into the Truth which exists within you.

We are all butterflies.

We are all swans.

We are Spiritual Beings.

The Springtime of the Spirit has arrived: It is possible to learn to Love yourself.

It is possible to be happy, Joyous, and free – if you are willing to be scared and hurt, angry and sad.

You are Lovable.

You are Loved.

You are LOVE.”

Robert Burney is a pioneer in the area of codependency recovery / inner child healing. His first book Codependence The Dance of Wounded Souls has been called “one of the truly transformational works of our time.”His website Joy2MeU.com offers over 200 pages of free original contenton codependency recovery, inner child healing, relationship dynamics, alcoholism/addiction, fear of intimacy, Twelve Step Spirituality, New Age Metaphysics, emotional abuse, setting boundaries, grief process, and much more.The Joy2MeU website is designed in an ancient design program which is not mobile friendly.A new site – joy2meu2.com – is a redesign of joy2meu.com in a mobile friendly format. The Joy2MeU2siteindex page that will help you to access most of his articles on mobile friendly sites (around 170.)

Articles 3 through 6 of this series are now exclusively available in the Dancing in Light pay to view component of Joy2MeU.com There are special offers for Dancing in Light and Joy2MeU Journal (where the Trilogy quoted can be accessed) subscription areas of Joy2MeU.

“I feel that my life Truly began on January 3rd, 1984. That was the day I entered a chemical dependency treatment center (aptly called the Independence Center) and started to learn how to live life clean and sober. One of the reasons I was able to stay clean and sober was because I had a considerable amount of ego strength. I had some strengths and talents that caused me to think that I was better than other people. That ego strength was my defense against the shame I felt at the core of my relationship with myself. I had a capacity for denial and rationalization that had helped me buy into the lie that other people were to blame for the failed wreckage my life had become.

I used that ego strength – and the false pride that told me I was better than other people – to help me stay sober. One of the ways I did that was to make my sobriety date very important to me. If I drank again, I would lose my sobriety date – and there was no way I wanted people who had less sobriety than me to get ahead of me. My twisted, distorted codependent thinking allowed me to turn sobriety into some kind of race that I was winning over some people.

My ego strength helped me to stay sober in the beginning of my recovery. It helped me to stay sober long enough to get into recovery from my codependency. My recovery from codependency led me into starting to dismantle my ego defenses. Breaking through my denial and rationalizations helped me to start getting emotionally honest with myself. Emotional honesty forced me to start owning the incredible reservoirs of grief and rage I was carrying. By the spring of 1988, my ego defenses had been weakened enough that the dam broke and my feelings started pouring forth. That was when I got the gift of entering another treatment center where I started learning how to deal with that grief and rage.

In that treatment center in Tucson Arizona I met one of the people who was going to turn out to be a true angel on my path. A person who would come to my rescue in the summer of 1988 after an unimaginable experience had revealed to me my Karmic mission in this lifetime. He offered me the use of his cabin in Taos New Mexico. It was in Taos that I started writing.

I later got to watch this “friend indeed” – whose name was also Robert – die because his codependency would not allow him to stay clean and sober.

“As a young child Robert got the message that he wasn’t lovable but that if he was successful enough and made enough money he might earn the right to be loved. He was successful and made lots of money but it did not work to convince him that he was good enough.

My friend had no permission from himself to receive love. When I published my book I listed him among people who had touched my life on the Acknowledgments Page. When he saw his name listed there he cursed me (his generation, and mine, were taught to relate to other men that way, to say ‘I love you’ by calling each other names) and cried briefly (which he felt was very shameful) and then he drank. In his relationship with himself Robert was too shame-based to believe that he was lovable.

I believe that the great majority of Alcoholics are born with a genetic, hereditary predisposition that is physiological. Environment does not cause Alcoholism. Robert was not an Alcoholic because he was shame-based – it was because of his shame that he could not stay sober. He had a blustery, ‘hail-fellow-well-met’, in your face kind of ego-strength that was very fragile. As soon as he got sober his ego defenses would fracture and the shame underneath would cause him to sabotage his sobriety.

That doesn’t mean that people who can stay sober don’t have shame. Some of us just have more ego defenses that buries the shame deeper. That is good news in early sobriety because it helps one to stay sober. It can be bad news later on because it can cause us to resist growth and to not have the humility to be teachable. The reason that I am alive today is because I was able to go to treatment for Codependence in my fifth year of recovery while working as a therapist in a treatment center. I had sworn that I would kill myself before I drank again and the feelings which were surfacing had me close to it when I went to Sierra Tucson. That was where I met Robert.” – The Death of an Alcoholic – codependency kills alcoholic

One of the cornerstone principles of the twelve step process is humility. Humility is required for growth to occur. On one level what humility means is to be teachable – to be open to growing and learning. ” – Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in the Light Book 2: A Dysfunctional Relationship with Life Chapter 6: ego strength and self worth

On January 2nd, 2018 I am putting this blog post together using excerpts from different places in my writing where I talk about getting sober. Tomorrow I will be 34 years clean and sober. An unbelievable miracle that I have achieved one day at a time – sometimes an hour at a time, sometimes 5 minutes at a time. I have immense gratitude for the gift of sobriety – as I say in the quote above, I feel like my life began on January 3rd, 1984.

I am doing this for my self primarily – as a review and a reminder of how far I have come and how blessed my path has been. There is a lot of really valuable information in these excerpts I am sharing, and hopefully it will be helpful to some of you who read it. Part of what has been so valuable for me to remember over these years however, is that first and foremost I am doing what I need to do for my self and my healing – that it helps other people is part of the magic and miracle of recovery.

“There were two interrelated things that I had to get clear about when I started working as a therapist: One is that I am powerless over other people – over the pace of their progress, over whether they hear what I am saying to them, over where their path leads. I watched a good friend die of Alcoholism (which is in a column in the Alcoholism section) and saw how clearly he helped other alcoholics stay sober because he couldn’t – he did more to keep more people sober than many of the sober people I know. I can’t know what someone else’s path is – therefore I can’t tell them what is right and wrong. What I can do is help them see themselves clearer (especially as to understanding how their childhood experiences have dictated their lives), see their choices and the possible consequences clearer, and know that we are Spiritual Beings going to boarding school not taking a test we can fail.

Which brings me to the second thing, which I believe is a Spiritual Truth – I teach best what I need most to learn. I teach people how to Love themselves because I am trying to learn how to Love myself. I learned to always listen to what I was saying because, though I have no control whether anyone else hears me, I do have the power to choose to hear myself – and there is always something in what I am saying that applies to me and my process in that moment. . . . . I am in process just as my clients are – just as we all are. There is no hierarchy as far as I am concerned – just one wounded person/Magnificent Spiritual Being sharing what has worked for me with another wounded person/Magnificent Spiritual Being. I am doing what I need to do for myself, to heal myself – it doesn’t have to do with anyone else – that it helps other people is just a bonus (and an opportunity to settle Karma).” – Inner Child Healing – Choosing a therapist or counselor with discernment

So, this is me being selfish (and indulgent as I often am in my writing) – and it will bring me great Joy if it is helpful and enjoyable to you. 🙂

“Twelve step recovery is a program of empowerment. Many people erroneously assume that the fact that first step involves admitting powerlessness means that 12 step recovery disempowers people. The Truth is exactly the opposite.

It was only when I admitted that I was powerless to control my drinking that I gained the power to stop drinking. As long as I was trying to control my drinking out of ego and will power, I was powerless to stop drinking alcoholically. It was when I opened up to getting help from a power greater than myself that I gained the power to transform my life. (There are some people – alcoholics – who can stop drinking using will power. They are what is referred to in the program as dry drunks. They are some of the most miserable, resentful, angry people on the face of the planet – because they have no spiritual belief system that is Loving.)

In the beginning for me, that power greater than myself was just the group – the people I met at AA meetings. Those people shared their stories, their thoughts and feelings, in a way that I identified with. Previously I had thought I was the only one who thought those kind of insane thoughts and had those kind of feelings of utter despair and hopelessness. When I first got to AA, I realized that I was not alone – I felt a connection to these people, felt a part of something larger than myself.

I however, had a real problem with the talk of God that I heard at meetings. I was raised in a shaming religion that taught me I was born sinful and shameful. I was emotionally and spiritually abused as a young child by being taught that God loved me but might send me to burn in eternal damnation in hell. I was taught that being human was shameful and sinful. (In one of my articles in my series on sexuality, gender, and relationships, I explained that it is not necessary for a person to be raised in a shaming religion to get the message that it is shameful to be human: Sexuality Abuse – the legacy of shame based culture.)

So, I had a real problem with even using the word God. And this was not just because of my personal experience, but also because of what I had learned about the history of the planet. I saw that throughout history “God” had been used as an justification for genocide, torture, plunder, and rape. I saw that a civilization based upon the “command” to go forth to subdue and conquer, not only destroyed peoples and cultures that were much kinder and more Loving than the conquerors – but was an integral part of going a long way towards destroying the planet we live on.

In my younger days I had been involved in activism with Native Americans – whom I could clearly see had been victimized by subdue, conquer, and slaughter mentality of the dominant culture. I found much beauty and harmony in the respect for nature and natural laws that was involved in the Native American concept a Higher Power – The Great Spirit. In the beginning of my book, I state some reasons that I wrote it – which included the following sentence.

“This is my way of standing up for my Truth, and of honoring “All My Relations,” which is a Native American term that refers to the Great Spirit whose essence is present in everyone and everything. We are all related to everyone and everything.”

(Quotes in this color are from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls)

If I had been told in January 1984, at the beginning of my recovery from alcoholism, that the only way I could quit killing myself with alcohol was to accept the standard version of “God” – I would never have gotten sober. I would have been dead long ago. But what I was told, was that I needed to find a concept of a Higher Power that worked for me – a Higher Power of my own understanding. That was what saved my life – the revolutionary concept that I could develop my own idea of a Higher Power, and develop a personal relationship with that Higher Power that did not have to conform to what anyone else believed.

So, in the beginning of my recovery, I allowed the fact that people in meetings – whom I identified with – seemed to have found a way to live life that worked for them, to help me stay sober one day at a time. I used the group as a power greater than myself, while I worked on trying to find a concept of a Higher Power that would work for me.

In those early days, I would call that Higher Power: The Great Spirit – or The Force. I remembered clearly that when the Star Wars movies first came out, I strongly resonated with the idea that “The Force is with you.”

It was when I was about 3 months sober that a book came into my life that altered my life, and my perspective of a Higher Power, immeasurably. The miracle of the “coincidence” of discovering that book – a book that reached out and grabbed my attention from the paperback rack in a grocery store – is something that still reduces me to tears of Joy and Gratitude 20 years later. I quoted that book several times in my book – and in this article I am going to use a quote from an online book I wrote that includes a quote from my book within it. That online book is the one that I wrote about the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. . . . .

“One of the first things I was guided to, when I was only about 3 months sober, was a mind boggling, paradigm smashing book called Illusions by Richard Bach. It presented me with concepts that it took me years to understand intellectually. But I knew instantly that the book was full of Truth.

In order to become aligned with Truth so that we can stop the war within and change life into an easier, more enjoyable experience, it is vitally important to become clear in our emotional process and to change the reversed attitudes that we had to adopt to survive. Those reversed attitudes are what cause our dysfunctional perspectives – which in turn, have caused us to have a lousy relationship with life.

I am going to quote from a book now, and again a little later, that is my own personal favorite book of Truth. I feel a great deal of Truth in this book. It has guided me and helped me to remember my Truth and to become conscious of my path. It was a very important part of my personal process of enlarging my perspective – of being able to see this life business in a larger context.

It is a book called Illusions by Richard Bach. This is one of my favorite quotations from that book.

The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy.

What a caterpillar calls the end of the world the master calls a butterfly.

The “depth of your belief” is about perspective. If we are reacting to life emotionally out of the belief systems we had imposed on us as children we will then see change as tragedy and feel that being forced to grow is shameful. As we change our attitudes toward this life experience, when we can start viewing it as a process, a journey, then we can begin to see that what we used to perceive as problems are really opportunities for growth. Then we can begin to realize that even though our experiences in childhood have caused to think of ourselves as, and feel like, lowly caterpillars – we are in Truth butterflies who are meant to fly.

We are all butterflies. We are all Spiritual Beings.

I used to use the caterpillar – butterfly quote a lot when I spoke. I would usually say something like “a measure of your Spiritual Awakening” instead of “mark of your ignorance” in order to soften it a bit. We codependents are such experts in beating ourselves up and shaming ourselves, that we tend to see the word ignorance as being something that is our fault. In fact, the word ignorance refers to a lack of knowledge, of not being informed. The reason we didn’t know how to set boundaries, or have healthy relationships, was because of ignorance caused by not having anyone to teach us – no healthy role models, no resources for learning how to be healthy. We not only did not have resources to teach us how to relate to life and other people in a healthy way – we were taught the very opposite of healthy behavior in most cases.” – Attack on America – A Spiritual Healing Perspective

The caterpillar and butterfly quote was incredibly powerful to me. I saw quitting drinking as a great tragedy – as the end of life as I knew it. And gratefully it was the end of life as I knew it, and the beginning of life as an adventure in learning to Love.

It was the concept that I could develop a belief in a Higher Power of my own understanding that helped to empower me to realize that I had a choice in the beliefs and definitions about “God” that I was allowing to dictate my relationship with life. It was this revolutionary concept that started me on the path to realizing that I was Lovable – that I could reconnect with, and access, an Unconditionally Loving Universal Force in a way that would help me remember that I am a beautiful butterfly that can Fly.” – A Higher Power of my own understanding 2 – the beginning of empowerment

“I am what researchers are now calling a “Type A” alcoholic. That means that my genetic predisposition to alcoholism was so strong that the only way I could have avoided being an alcoholic was to never have taken a drink. I got drunk the very first time that I had the opportunity to get drunk. I also had a blackout the first time I got drunk. A black out is when someone loses consciousness even though they are still walking and talking and appearing to be somewhat normal. There is a gap in the memory (What did I do last night?) because of the effect of the alcohol on the brain. I would wake up the next day not remembering anything after a certain point in time. I wouldn’t know how I had gotten home, where my car was parked, and sometimes I wouldn’t know who I was with. I had blackouts – with increasing regularity – starting with the first time I got drunk and continuing for the 17 years that I drank.

Alcohol saved my life. I think that I would have killed myself if I had not discovered alcohol. I was so terrified of life and people and felt so inadequate to cope with life. Alcohol (and later drugs of various types) gave me permission to be human – which the environment I grew up in had not. With alcohol I could loosen up and interact with other people.

At the end of my drinking days – which had been hell for a number of years – the Universe led me through many applications of the Cosmic stick to go home to Nebraska for the Holidays in December of 1983. While there my parents – who had learned about alcoholism because a cousin of mine had gotten sober – did an intervention on me. They asked me to go into a 30 day treatment program.

I can remember sitting with them in the office of the person who did the intake evaluations and feeling completely trapped. By this time I had no money and no car, and I had been counting on them to be good enablers and loan me the money to get me going again. The thing that really got me though was when my father said to the intake person “We want to get help for him because we love him a lot.”

I had never before heard my father use the term love in reference to me. [He still to this day has never been able to tell me that he loves me.(My father died in May 2005. On his death bed I told him I loved him – and the best he could say in return was “Same here.”)] I can remember thinking at that moment, “Oh crap, now I have to do this.” As if his using the word love was some sort of currency that obligated me to do whatever he wanted.

So I went into a treatment program in Lincoln Nebraska. For the first two weeks I really resisted being there. I thought the people were weird and I certainly didn’t need any of this religious God crap that they were talking about. I called friends back in LA and complained about how I was locked in this horrible place. (No doors were locked.)

The turning point came for me when some druggy friends back in LA offered to buy me a plane ticket back to the coast. That was the point where I had to admit to myself that I had a choice. I had spent my whole life being the victim because I didn’t believe I had choices – now I had a choice.

So I had to take a good look at myself and my life and see if I wanted to return to the way I had been living. When I looked at how messed up –

(God, what an understatement. As I wrote that last sentence, I started crying remembering what a hell I had been living in. At some point in treatment I realized that the song that described what my life had been like was Desperado – “Your prison is walking through life all alone.” “You’d better get down off you fence and let someone love you before it is too late.” After I got sober I swore to myself that I would kill myself before I would ever take another drink.)

When I took a realistic view of what hell my life had been, I had to admit to myself that I didn’t ever want to live that way again. So I turned down the plane ticket and surrendered to trying to learn the things that those weird people were trying to teach me.” – The Path of one Recovering Codependent ~ the dance of one wounded soul The Awakening Begins in the Joy2MeU Journal

“12/24/11 ~ As my 28th sobriety birthday approaches in 10 days or so, I have been reflecting back on what an incredible miracle my life has been since January 3rd, 1984. This page was originally just an article in a series of articles on “A Higher Power of my own understanding” – an article in which I talk about how the 12 step program of Alcoholics Anonymous saved my life. Two years ago, on my 26th sobriety birthday I added some quotes below the article from some of my writing in which I talk about my drinking and early sobriety. This year it was very appropriate for reasons that shall be obvious, that I share something I have shared in AA meetings on many occasions – including I am sure in many of my birthday meetings – but I don’t think I have ever written about. (It possible I have, since I have written so much – but oh well.)

When I first got sober in a 30 day treatment program in Lincoln Nebraska, I got very afraid as it came time to leave treatment. I felt like I had been in a safe haven for almost 30 days, and I wasn’t sure how I would fare back out in the world again. (This was when I learned a very important lesson about working the third step when I went to see my counselor right before I was to get out.)

I couldn’t conceive of staying clean and sober for a year. I couldn’t remember the last time I had gone for more than 3 days without something – drugs or alcohol – to take the edge off. The one exception to that was one time about 2 years before I got sober when I quit drinking for 30 days to see if I wanted to die as much when I wasn’t drinking as when I was. It wasn’t much of a test however, as I was still smoking some dope occasionally – plus I was starring in a play and having an affair with a married woman who was in the play with me, so had plenty of distractions to help me in my dry period. At the cast party for the play I had a beer and just kind of forgot about ever thinking that drinking was a problem. I was back to drinking alone to black out within a couple of weeks after that.

Anyway, I couldn’t imagine a year sober – and at the same time, I saw people who made it to a year and then drank again. I was afraid of making it a goal to get to a year – because it was such a long time away, and also because I didn’t want to set myself up to feel like if I got there I had it made. So, I decided to make my goal to reach 100 days – which was an impossibly long period for me at that point. And then once I got to 100 days, I made my next goal 1000 days. I would mention when I took my birthday cake after I reached 1000 days that my next goal was 10,000 days. It seemed like an unfathomably distant goal. Well, some time this year – in May I think – I passed 10,000 days clean and sober. Mind boggling! Talk about a miracle!!

As you can see from the comments I added two years ago after the article – I am Truly a miracle. Among those comments belowabove is a quote from an article in my Joy2MeU Journal entitled: The Awakening Begins. I decided to add an excerpt from the next article in that series – entitled: The Emotional Awakening Begins – to this page to commemorate my 28th sobriety anniversary and to be reminded of how far I have come since 1984.

“When I first came to recovery I knew a lot about emotions and had almost no permission to feel them personally. I had no permission to feel them personally because my emotional programming from the role modeling of my parents in childhood taught me that men have only one emotion – anger – and that it wasn’t OK to be angry at women – since my mother’s definition of love included the belief that you can’t be angry at someone you love, meaning it was not OK for me to be angry at her. My emotional palette, in terms of my personal unconscious relationship with my emotions, consisted of one color – anger – that was only truly acceptable to feel towards men. Consciously, in my personal view of my self, I believed I was a very emotional person with a full palette.

I also knew quite a lot about emotions because I had spent many years in Hollywood pursuing an acting career. I understood the human emotional process enough to see clearly that all humans had the same basic emotions – no matter how different their outside circumstances, or the details of their stories may have been. When I had the right role I could play an audience like a emotional musical instrument.

In retrospect, I believe that my acting was one of the reasons I was still alive. I got much needed emotional release through the characters I played. It was the type of emotional release that did not do anything for me personally in terms of healing (it is very important to own our feelings, crying for someone else is emotionally dishonest – the reason someone else’s pain affects us is because it triggers our own) – it just allowed me to vent some emotional energy, which kept me from exploding or imploding. (The other major reason that I was still alive is that I had alcohol and drugs to help me keep the pain at bay. Without alcohol I do think I would have killed myself before I was 21 because I was so emotionally isolated and had so much pain and rage stuffed inside – in fact I made a bet with a friend my freshman year in college that I wouldn’t live to graduate, the bet was a case of beer.)

Whenever I started working on a new character, the first thing I would try to decide was what the characters ‘gut level fears’ were. I would pontificate to other actors about how people were driven by their gut level fears – and feel very proud of my ability to create real living breathing character studies based on my methods. (I specialized in very intense characters who were very wounded – alcoholics, addicts, loners, crazy people, etc. – like “duh” I wonder why. I even once for an on camera personalization exercise did Hamlet’s soliloquy ‘To be or not to be’ where he is contemplating suicide, using a drink instead of a dagger as the prop. My acting teacher was convinced I was suicidal – I thought it just showed how brilliant I was that I was able to ‘act’ suicidal. Denial is an amazing thing!)

So, my focus as an actor was on what fears drove my characters – but I personally had no fear. When I first went into the Chemical Dependence Treatment Center where I got sober I heard people at meetings or in lectures mention being afraid. I have a very clear memory of sitting in one of my first AA meetings where someone talked about being afraid and thinking “Who are these people! So afraid. I’ve never been afraid – they stuck guns in my face and I wasn’t afraid. These people are wimps!”

I had no permission in my subconscious programming, in the definition of what I learned men feel from my male role model, to have fear. I was incapable of consciously acknowledging fear in my personal process because it was unacceptable.

My self image on a conscious level was of being Mr. Nice Guy. I would do anything for you, and I was always pleasant and entertaining. My self image on an emotional level – my protective armor that I wore unconsciously – was of the ‘man in black.’ The strong quiet type that you didn’t want to mess with because you could see in my eyes that messing with me would be very unpleasant. (This was a defense I developed when I was being a revolutionary and carrying a gun – I was in some pretty hairy situations and the defense served to keep me alive.) I had a force field that I put up around myself to protect myself. I knew how to put off vibes that said very clearly ‘stay away.’

One of the important breakthroughs I had during my 30 days in treatment came in my third week there. My counselor was not sure how to handle me because of my intensity and the fact – which, since it was where I derived much of my ego strength, I made very clear – that I was a ‘Hollywood Actor.’ (The treatment center was in Nebraska – a long way from Hollywood.) So, in consultation with the other counselors they decided to keep me off balance by switching me between therapy groups – and giving each of the male counselors a shot at me.

There were three primary groups for men and usually a person was in one group the whole time they were in treatment. In my third week, I showed up for group and was told that I had to go to a different group. They refused to tell me why this was happening. In about the middle of the week, I was in a group where for the first time I got to experience a full-on mirroring of myself. The previous week in my primary group I had been confronted about putting up a barrier to scare people away – and I had responded by denying it and tearfully saying how I loved people and would never try to scare them away. Well, in that other group I got to sit and watch another man get confronted about the same thing and deny it just as I had done – and I saw myself in him so clearly that I had to immediately point out that I could see he was not being honest because watching him I realized that I had not been honest.

At the end of this week of switching back and forth between the three groups, I was in a group with a grizzled old counselor who had been around for many years. He asked me if I had learned anything from all the switching around and then sat and listened patiently while I expounded on all that I had learned.

When I was done, he asked quietly and quizzically “And you didn’t know why we were doing that, did you?”

“No,” I said “I had no idea.”

Then he sweetly smiled and drove home the point, “Well, maybe it is not important for you to know why something is happening then.”

Shot the heck out of some of my control issues right there.

This treatment center worked with what was called the ‘Minnesota model’ in dealing with emotional issues. What that meant was that they identified 6 primary feelings and forced us patients to identify our feelings only using those words. The 6 were mad, sad, glad, hurt, afraid, ashamed. That drove me crazy. One of the defenses that I used to distance myself from my feelings was not naming them. They forced me to start naming my feelings. I couldn’t say “I was confused,” or “irritated” or “apprehensive” or “annoyed” etc. I had to name a feeling. It really drove me crazy since I did not know on a personal level what feelings really were, let alone what I was feeling.

I was forced to start trying to figure out what I was feeling – and to stop being in my head all of the time. One of my primary defenses against feeling my feelings was to be in my head. In my early recovery I had to start paying attention to what was happening in my body from the neck down – because that is where emotions manifest.

Since I was so out of touch with my feelings, I had to come up with clues for myself. Things that I could notice that would be a clue to me that feelings were going on.

By the time I got done with the 30 day program I was really in touch with my fear. I realized that rather than never having been afraid – the truth was that I had been afraid of everybody and everything since I was a kid. I was absolutely terrified of leaving the treatment center because I was so scared that I would drink again. I could see clearly what a hell my life had been and I did not ever want to go back to living the way I had been. I swore to myself that I would kill myself before I took another drink.

So wanting a drink became my most important early clue to tell me that I had some feelings going on that I needed to deal with. When I caught myself, while watching TV, really watching the beer commercials, I would have to stop and say, “whoa, that beer really looks good – I must be feeling something.” Or when I was driving down the street and noticing every cocktail sign and liquor billboard – that would be a clue that I needed to do a little emotional inventory.

One of the classic moments came because of a friend who was a musician. He was having trouble staying sober while he was playing – so a few of us would go to an AA meeting on Friday or Saturday night and then go to whatever Lounge he was playing at. It was a very good opportunity for me to be around drinking with a bunch of safe people and get used to not drinking in a social setting. But there was one night when I realized that I had some feelings going on that made it unsafe for me to be in a bar. My clue came when I started tearing up while my friend played what to me was a very sad ballad. It was real progress for me to recognize that I was emotionally vulnerable and needed to get out of there. Pretty funny in retrospect. The sad ballad was “Jose Cuervo, he was a good friend of mine.”” – The Path of one Recovering Codependent ~ the dance of one wounded soul The Emotional Awakening Begins in the Joy2MeU Journal

A very valuable lesson – I don’t have to know why something is happening in order to accept that it is part of the Divine Plan somehow. Things often haven’t gone the way I wanted them in the last 28 years – and over and over again I have been grateful when I looked back and saw the perfection of my Higher Power’s plan for me. (Something I talked about in the comments I added to my working the third step page (next excerpt) in commemoration of this birthday.) Onward and upward for the next 10,000 days. Happy Birthday to me!!!!!!!!” – Joy to You & Me and Joy2MeU Update February 2012

“I celebrated my 17th sobriety birthday on January 3rd. 17 years is pretty much incomprehensible for someone who couldn’t go for 3 days without a drink or a drug. It doesn’t seem like it went fast though – rather it seems like I have lived 7 or 8 lifetimes since 1984. It is important for me to remember where I came from, and how far the Spirit has lead me on this journey. As they say, the qualities of my problems has greatly improved. 😉

It is especially important for me to remember that right now, because I have been going through one of those difficult times in recovery. There are times when everything is flowing fast and furious, with miracles popping up every time I turn around. Then there are other times when it seems dark and murky – like I am trying to move through quick sand and not making any progress.

When I am in one of the difficult times, it is so important to observe myself so that I can catch myself when I start going into shame and judgment. This disease is so insidious and powerful. It puts up huge resistance to change and then turns around and tells me that I am not changing fast enough – that I am not doing enough, not doing it “right.”

As I say many times on my web site, the challenge for us is to have compassion for ourselves, and to accept wherever we are at as being a perfect part of the process, rather than punishment for being bad. My critical parent voice wants to beat up on that wounded little boy in me whose father raged at him, who couldn’t protect his mother, and who was taught that god was judgmental and punishing.

I have to call on the defense attorney within to stand up to the prosecuting critical parent and the judge who wants to sentence me to suffering. Sometimes it is easier than others. Sometimes it is important just to accept that I am feeling overwhelmed, alone, and worn out – and to let myself indulge a little. A few days ago, I let myself just kind of wallow in the part of me that feels like a wounded animal who wants to crawl into my cave and lick my wounds.

Accepting and embracing that part of me for a few hours – allowing myself to crawl into bed with a book and some chocolate – allows me to get through it and come out on the other side in a way that fighting it never does. The disease wants to tell me that when I am feeling bad it will last forever. That is a lie. Accepting where I am at without shame and judgment and reminding myself that this too shall pass is an important part of maintaining some sense of balance today.

I think part of what I have been going through is a planetary thing – the process has cycles and this seems to be a murky one. Part of it is the changes I am making in my life that I spoke about in my last newsletter. Being in transition is always a difficult time. I sometimes think about how it must feel to be a caterpillar in the cocoon – being torn apart and put back together as a butterfly. That is kind of what happens in recovery – except we get to be conscious of the tearing apart process in a way that I am sure caterpillars are not. A dubious gift if you ask me.

I also, have just gotten aware in the last couple of days that I may have had some denial going over the holidays. I thought I had sailed through the holidays without hitting any of those pot holes of grief over being alone – the pot holes that used to be huge abysses (is that a word?). I even congratulated myself on how I had succeeded in taking all of the emotional charge out the holidays – when I used to really feel lonely and have great sadness over being alone.

It seems I may have some of that grief and loneliness after all. It is natural in my process that, sometimes when I am consciously choosing to focus on the part of the glass that is full, I overshoot a little and indulge in a little denial about the part that is still empty. Oh well. Got caught being human again.” – Joy to You & Me and Joy2MeU Update January 2001“On January 3, 2002 I will celebrate 18 years of being clean and sober. I have actually been clean and sober now for longer than I drank and used. An amazing miracle that has unfolded one day at a time. Some of those days were excruciatingly painful – full of hopelessness and despair. In early recovery, I didn’t make it through those days sober because I wanted to be sober – or because I wanted to be alive. I made it through one day at a time because I was terrified of returning to, and getting stuck in, the hell I had been living in for the last 4 or 5 years of my drinking.

There is an old AA saying that: Alcoholics Anonymous doesn’t open up the gates of heaven and let us in – it opens up the gates of hell and lets us out. When I got released from my alcoholic hell, what I found myself experiencing was life. The very thing I had been drinking to cope with!

What I realize now, is that I was released from alcoholic hell and found myself in codependent hell. My relationship with my self and with life condemned me to codependent hell – and alcohol and drugs had given me a vacation of sorts from dealing with the fact that I did not have a clue of how to live life in a functional way.

I am very, very grateful now that I am a recovering alcoholic. If I had not found alcohol and drugs, I would have killed myself in one way or another in my late teens or early twenties. My 17 plus year drinking career kept me alive long enough to be present when planetary conditions changed so that the New Age of Healing and Joy could dawn in human consciousness. Long enough to have available to me, the tools and knowledge to be able to heal my wounded soul and learn to live life in a way that works. Long enough that first Adult Children of Alcoholics, and then Co-Dependents Anonymous meetings, were available to help me in my healing process.

The dysfunctional dance of Codependence is caused by being at war with ourselves – being at war within.

We are at war with ourselves because we are judging and shaming ourselves for being human. We are at war with ourselves because we are carrying around suppressed grief energy that we are terrified of feeling. We are at war within because we are “damming” our own emotional process – because we were forced to become emotionally dishonest as children and had to learn ways to block and distort our emotional energy.

We cannot learn to Love ourselves and be at peace within until we stop judging and shaming ourselves for being human and stop fighting our own emotional process, until we stop waging war on ourselves.

Detachment and Delayed Gratification

I can see now, that the reason I was able to stay sober was because of two concepts that are invaluable to any healing or growth. The first one made the second possible. It is the first of these concepts that is the single most important step in the inner healing process – the one that I stress so much to anyone I am working with on how to change and improve the quality of their lives.

That concept is detachment.

Codependence is a compulsively reactive condition. I had gone through life like a pin ball – bouncing / reacting from one point to the next, from one person to the next. It was never my fault. Someone, or something else, was always to blame for how messed up my life was – for how awful I felt inside. I focused on blame and resentment because the only alternative that I knew was to blame myself. I was at war inside of myself – and because I was taught to look outside for definition and worth by the society I grew up in, I tried to assign the blame externally for that internal war.

At the core of codependency is shame about being human. This shame was caused by a polarized, black and white intellectual paradigm that empowered the perspective that the only alternatives for evaluating worth, for determining value, are right and wrong. Human beings are incapable of being perfect based upon a perspective in which the only alternatives are right and wrong.

Codependency is a dysfunctional relationship with life, with being human. It is the dance I learned to do as a little kid. It is a dance whose music is generated from fear and shame, to a rhythm dictated by black and white thinking. It is a dance characterized by movement between extremes – blame them or blame me, overreact or underreact, less than or better than, success or failure, win or lose, etc., – which makes balance impossible. There is no middle ground in a dance that can only be done right or wrong. There can be no inner peace.

Since I was continually attempting to do life perfect (or rebelling by going to the opposite extreme) according to false beliefs about the nature and purpose of being human, I could never have any inner peace. I judged my self and my life experience, both consciously and unconsciously, out of a dysfunctional polarized belief system – so that it was not possible to stop being at war within. At the core of my being I felt like I was a defective monster, some kind of shameful, unlovable loser – and I tried to deflect some of that pain by blaming others.

No wonder I drank. Alcohol – and later drugs of various kinds – saved my life.

The first thing I had to do to get sober was to detach enough from my personal reality – from my hellish emotional pain and shame, from the intellectual garbage generated by my twisted codependent thinking – to become conscious of the reality that alcohol was not working for me anymore. I had to get conscious enough to be able to realize that it had been many years since alcohol had given me the relief and good feelings that it had when I started drinking.

With any addictive, mind / mood altering substance / behavior, the very thing that brought some relief from the internal war and mental anguish – the substance or behavior that gives us feelings of being high, of rising above our lives of quiet desperation, of feeling good – becomes something that we feel is necessary just to feel normal. Then eventually, normal becomes very low indeed.

I had to detach from myself enough to look at my life from a perspective that allowed me to see that maybe my behavior had something to do with why I was so miserable – but that is was not because I was a shameful being. The twelve step concept of powerlessness – the idea that alcoholism was a disease rather than a weakness of character – allowed me to detach and view my behavior, my drinking and using, with enough objectivity to start seeing reality with more clarity.

Once I surrendered to the reality that alcohol was hurting me rather than helping me, then I could make some effort to start living life differently. It was necessary for me to get a detached, objective look at myself in order for me to get honest enough with myself to decide that it might be better for me to get sober. I did not stop drinking because I wanted to stop drinking. I stopped drinking because alcohol and drugs were not working for me any more. When I was able to look at reality with some detachment, I could see that what I thought was the solution had actually become the most pressing problem.

The second concept that was so valuable in staying sober and starting to change my life, was the concept of delayed gratification. When I first started recovery, I thought that living life one day at a time was a revolutionary concept for me. But looking back now, I can see that living life one day at a time is what I had been doing all my life. The difference was that I had been living out of instant gratification.

As I describe on my page The codependent three step – A Dance of Shame, Suffering, & Self-Abuse, codependency is a vicious, compulsive, self-abusive dynamic – an prison that we are trapped in as long as we are reacting. In my codependent dance I was the victim of myself, I was my own perpetrator, and I rescued myself in ways that were ultimately self abusive. The shame and pain I was feeling was causing me to feel like a victim, the critical parent voice in my head was beating me up for being a stupid loser, and I was rescuing myself with drugs and alcohol.

In early recovery, I learned to think the next drink through to the consequences before picking it up. In other words, think about how I would feel about myself tomorrow if I take a drink today. And be conscious enough to tell myself the truth that I didn’t want just one drink – I wanted oblivion, unconsciousness.

So, I started living life one day at a time from a detached place of consciousness that was aware of cause and effect – and understood that not indulging in instant gratification today would help me to not hate myself so much tomorrow.

I have often said that Gratitude is not nearly a big enough word to describe how grateful I am and how blessed I feel to be in recovery. January 3rd 2018 is my 34th sobriety birthday and I am profoundly, deeply, everlastingly grateful for the gift of recovery in my life.

“I am profoundly, deeply, everlastingly grateful for the gift of the 12 steps. The process of learning to apply the Spiritual Principles in my life has changed my life from an unendurable hell to an adventure that is exciting and enJoyable most of the time. The twelve steps work. That is the bottom line. They work to help a person transform their experience of life into something better. They work to help a person learn to develop a relationship with life and self that allows room for inner peace, happiness, and Joy. The twelve step process works to help a person open up to Love.” – The Miracle of The Twelve Step Recovery Process – a formula for integration and balance

There are probably 5 or 6 million words in the two subscription areas of my site that I quote from in this entry. I have a page with special offers on lifetimes subscriptions to those password protected areas: Dancing in Light and the Joy2MeU Journal.Millions of words of content not available on Joy2MeU.

It is possible to get personally autographed copies of my books from my website Joy2MeUor You can get my Books, eBooks, and Audiobooks through Amazon, Books or eBooks through Barnes & Noble, or eBooks through Kobo.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to quote from: Illusions “The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah” by Richard Bach. Copyright 1977 by Creature Enterprises, Inc. Reprinted in Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls by Robert Burney by permission of Bantam Doubleday Dell, New York, NY.

“I am inserting a note here for anyone who feels offended by what they see as a violation of the Eleventh Tradition of AA’s Twelve Traditions. The 11th Tradition of AA is:

Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films.

I routinely break my own anonymity in regard to the fact that I am a recovering alcoholic / addict and codependent because I do not believe I would be alive today if Betty Ford had not broken her anonymity in the late 1970s and brought the subject of alcoholism out of the closet into public view. She is one of the people I dedicated my book to because I believe that I personally owe her a debt of gratitude for her courage and honesty. Breaking my own anonymity is one way that I carry the message of hope that saved my life. Anyone whose black and white thinking is causing them to rigidly interpret the Twelve Steps and Traditions enough to be offended, desperately needs to get into codependency recovery in my opinion.” – Robert Burney 2/10/04

My step grandson / godson Darien turned 7 in November 2011 – and I wrote this in early 2012.

The age of 7 is a vital milestone in the child developmental process.Recognizing the significance of this milestone many years ago was a key to me understanding the disease of codependence.

The “age of reason” is actually a phrase that I have heard since childhood – because growing up Catholic it was at the age of reason that one could first take communion.Basically it means that the part of a child’s brain that understands cause and effect, and logic – and abstract concepts – doesn’t fully develop until around 7.

“The part of a child’s brain that is logical and rational, that understands abstract concepts (like time or death), that can have any kind of an objective perspective on self or life, does not develop until about the age of 7 (the age of reason.)As little children we were completely ego-centric and magical thinking.” – Reprogramming our dysfunctional ego defenses

In my telephone counseling and my Intensive Training workshops, I have evolved a way of explaining the importance of this that I don’t think I have ever written in quite the way I explain it these days – so I think I will write about this a bit.It was for me of utmost importance to recognize the significance of how we were affected by our environments in early childhood to not only understand codependence, but even more importantly to be able to start forgiving ourselves for something that wasn’t our fault, for something we had no control over.And I also want to acknowledge how perfect it is to have had Darien in my life for the last almost 7 years, because I got to watch his developmental process in action in ways that confirmed what I had intuitively come to understand years before.This story I am going to share has to do with Darien coming into the age of reason.

Prior to 7, we are primarily ego-centric and magical thinking.Our parents were our Higher Powers – the God and Goddess in our lives – and we had no realistic perspective of them whatsoever.As we are starting to grow up, we start to understand basic cause and effect – like, when you turn on the light switch the light comes on, the kinds of things I watched Darien discover with delight.But we can’t understand more abstract concepts.We are not capable of process thought.For instance, when we are 3 or 4 or 5, we are not capable of thinking to ourselves, “Wow, Mom must be having a really bad day – that’s why she is yelling at me.”We just know that Mom is yelling at us.We do not have the ability to have a perspective that helps us understand that our parents have stress in their lives, or that the ways they are acting may have nothing to do with us.

As I said, we are ego-centric – we are the center of the Universe as far as we know.We took their behavior, the ways they treated us and the messages we got from them – both direct messages and indirect ones through their role modeling – personally.We thought what was happening had to do with us – because we weren’t capable of seeing it any other way.

So anything that felt abusive, any kind of deprivation, anything in the environment that was uncomfortable – fighting, anxiety, depression, alcoholism, etc. – we took personally and internalized.We were the center of our Universe and it felt like the things that were painful and uncomfortable were our fault somehow.In my inner child work, I got in touch with the reality that by the time I was about 5 I felt ashamed that I wasn’t able to protect my mother from my father – I felt like a failure somehow.Children are magical thinking.They feel like they have the power to cause fights, to cause drinking, to cause death even for some of us.

This is where the core of codependence comes from – what I call toxic shame.The difference between guilt and shame in my definition, is that guilt is about behavior (I did something wrong, I made a mistake) – while shame is about our being (something is wrong with me, I am a mistake.)It is the place deep inside of us where we feel somehow defective, somehow unlovable and unworthy because our parents were wounded.They didn’t know how to love themselves or be emotionally healthy – so they could not love us in a healthy way.They were our Higher Powers so we couldn’t conceive that they weren’t perfect.We learned how to relate to our self, to life, and to other people in early childhood from people that were wounded in their childhoods.

“”The Family Systems Dynamics research shows that within the family system, children adopt certain roles according to their family dynamics.Some of these roles are more passive, some are more aggressive, because in the competition for attention and validation within a family system the children must adopt different types of behaviors in order to feel like an individual.” . . .

. . . . It is important to note that we adapt the roles that are best suited to our personalities.We are, of course, born with a certain personality.What happens with the roles we adapt in our family dynamic is that we get a twisted, distorted view of who we are as a result of our personality melding with the roles. This is dysfunctional because it causes us to not be able to see ourselves clearly.As long as we are still reacting to our childhood wounding and old tapes then we cannot get in touch clearly with who we really are.” – Roles In Dysfunctional Families

The feeling that there is something wrong with me – toxic shame – is the foundation that we built our relationship with self on.It is the foundation of codependence.

Then what happens, is that our ego – which is the part of our being whose job is to help us survive – adapts an emotional and behavioral defense system to help us fit into the rules of our dysfunctional family so that we can survive.One of a child’s jobs is to manipulate it’s environment in order to survive – so a child will adapt whatever works.If throwing temper tantrums works;if crying works;if being the good child works;if trying to be invisible is what works;if being the family clown is what works;that is what a child will adapt.Neurological researchers now state that the neural pathways in our brain that relate to relating to other human beings are pretty well set by the time we are four or five years old.

“One of the new links I recently added to my recommend links page is to a great movie: What the Bleep Do We Know!?It is a movie about quantum physics – and I didn’t just like it because they sounded like they were quoting from my book at times.It is really quite fascinating stuff.One of the things that was especially gratifying to me had to do with the neural pathways in the brain.I have been telling people for quite a few years that it was possible to reprogram the neural pathways in our brains by doing the inner child healing work – but that was an intuitive Knowing on my part.It was something that I Knew to be Truth – even though I wasn’t real clear on exactly what neural pathways were.In the movie they have some wonderful animation – that among other things shows how the neural pathways can be programmed either negatively or positively depending upon what attitudes and perspectives a person chooses to empower.” – Update Newsletter December 2004

In childhood we had attitudes and perspectives imposed upon us.We learned to relate to life out of fear, shame, and scarcity because that was how our parents were programed to relate to life.

Codependence is an ego defense system adapted in early childhood – and after early childhood what we do is add more layers to what is already a dysfunctional system.It is a dysfunctional defense system because it is based on a lie – the lie being that there is something wrong with who we are, with our being.There is nothing wrong with who we are – it is our relationship with self (and life and other people) that is all messed up because we did not have the mental capacity to understand that what was happening in our families was not personal.We did not have the ability to see that our parents were wounded and reacting to their own wounds – they were our Higher Powers.

When we get to be 8 or 9, we start to see the hypocrisy and the lies – but by then our relationship with our self is being dictated by the feeling that we had in early childhood that there was something wrong with who we are as a being.We are already programmed to feel like it is shameful to be imperfect and to look outside for validation in competition with others.

Darien and The Tooth Fairy

The dilemma Susan and I had recently was – “what should we tell him when something happens to cause him to question if there is a tooth fairy?”Do we tell him the truth or let him continue with the magical thinking?

It was about a week before Christmas when Darien lost another tooth.It was his fourth baby tooth that he has lost.And it happened the same way that the last tooth was lost, in the kid’s klub at the gym.On the way to the gym that day, I got a foreshadowing of what was to come in a way.In a reminder that he was at the age of reason, he said on the way to the gym, “How can Santa Claus take toys to every house in the world all in one night?”

I didn’t really answer his question – even though he asked it several more times, because I didn’t want to hurry the process along.I want to let him reach his own conclusions in his own time, and not lay the truth on him when he wasn’t ready for it.

That night he put his tooth in a box under his pillow for the tooth fairy to take and leave him some money.But the tooth fairy (that would be me – his grandpa) forgot about the tooth in the box.So did he.The next morning as he was getting ready for school, he was brushing his teeth and that reminded me that he had lost the tooth the night before and his grandma didn’t know about it.Without thinking I said, “Darien lost another tooth yesterday” – and then realized I hadn’t taken care of the tooth.I headed for his bed while Susan delayed him – and I quickly put a dollar in the box and put it back under the pillow.

But I forgot to take out the tooth!

He was glad to see the dollar but then noticed the tooth.And then he got mad at me and said something like, “Why did you do that grandpa?”Then, I think the thought occurred to him that I was the tooth fairy – and it made him angry.He went into the bathroom and locked the door.I asked him if he didn’t need help brushing his hair – and he said “I will do it myself.”We could hear that he was really mad about it.

On the way to school he start asking about it – if I had put the dollar in the box the other times.I avoided answering the first few times, and then admitted it.He started crying at the thought that there was no tooth fairy.Then another thought occurred to him, and he asked, “Do you have my other teeth, because I don’t remember what they looked like?”I admitted that I did have the other teeth – and he was kind of intrigued by the thought of seeing all of his lost teeth.Then he started singing jingle bells and was happy for a few moments.

Then another thought occurred to him, and he asked, “Did Grandma tell you to do it?”I think that he was trying to figure out a way that it wasn’t my fault because he trusts me more than anyone (I have been his primary caretaker for a lot of years now – the one he goes to for nurturing) and he wanted to blame it on grandma.(His grandma Susan will sometimes accidentally use his tooth brush or eat a snack he was saving – at this very moment Darien is hiding his favorite tooth brushes to make sure Susan doesn’t use them.)But I didn’t buy into that.I told him that it was just something that parents did for their kids.That my mom and dad did it for me.That I had believed in the tooth fairy too.

He said in a real sad voice, “I believed in the tooth fairy too.”

Then as we were walking from the car to his classroom, he stopped me.He told me to take the money back – and to tell grandma never to do that again.And that he would prove there was a tooth fairy.

That afternoon when he got home from school he found the box (which I had taken the tooth out of, and put in 2 dollars) – and exclaimed, “See, I told you there was a tooth fairy.”But then later on he asked for his teeth – which I did give to him.

So, now he is in kind of an in between place.He has been confronted with evidence that the tooth fairy didn’t take his teeth, but he is still choosing to believe there is a tooth fairy.

The same thing has kind of happened with Santa Claus.He had spotted some presents in the top of the closet that he later realized showed up under the tree on Christmas Day.On Christmas, Susan said something about wanting to take a nap because she hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before – and he says, “Oh I get it.Santa didn’t bring presents, you guys did it.”

Later in the day, he said something to Susan about it – and she replied something like, “Did you really believe Santa went to all the houses in the world with presents?”And he went into a defense of Santa that included the compelling evidence, “That he has elves to help him, remember!”

So, he is in between now – seeing things more logically but choosing to keep his magical thinking for now.It will be interesting to see what happens the next time he loses a tooth.

In the midst of the tooth fairy trauma, Susan said to me, “What do we tell him.If we keep lying to him he won’t trust us.”An interesting question that I still am not quite sure about.I think we have reached kind of a balance right now.He is still mostly choosing to believe – but he has started to wake up to the fact we – and society – have not been honest with him.It makes me wonder about a society – a civilization – that is dishonest with us when we are children, which sets us up to live life in a dysfunctional way.

When I am telling people about the dynamics of codependency, I always mention that the ego is not a bad or negative thing in and of itself – it just got programmed really badly.And the original dysfunctional programming came from fairy tales.

“I will be talking about some different aspects of both intellectual and emotional discernment in coming articles. For this article I want to make a point about how important this process is by using the example of some basic dysfunctional beliefs that are at the foundation of our relationship with life.These are the beliefs that we learned from the fairy tales we heard in early childhood.

We learned that when we meet our Prince or Princess we will live happily-ever-after.We got the message that there was a destination to reach in life where we would find a state of being that is happily-ever-after.

That is not true.It is not the way life works.You know that now.As an adult, you consciously and intellectually know that there is no happily-ever-after – if you have ever stopped to think about it.

Unfortunately however, that belief is programmed into our subconscious intellectual paradigm and as such, it determines our perspective of life, of romance, of our self – and thus dictates our emotional relationship with those aspects of our human experience.

We are set up to feel like failures in life, and in romantic relationships, because we do not get to reach happily-ever-after.We judge and shame ourselves because we haven’t lived up to the fairy tale.We blame ourselves – or we blame others for this feeling of failure.

This feeling of failure is an illusion based upon a fairy tale.It is based upon beliefs about life that are not true – that have never been true.It is part of our subconscious programming and the only way to change it is to change that subconscious programming – and heal the emotional wounds that we have experienced because our dysfunctional relationships with life and romance set us up to feel like failures.

We cannot do that without looking within.We need to become willing to start shining the light of consciousness into the darkness of our subconscious in order to take power away from that which is in the dark.Looking outside to find the answers does not work.It is only by looking within that we can start healing and recovering from the false beliefs that we learned in childhood.” – Intellectual Discernment – focused within

We are set up to expect life to be something it is not in childhood.To expect romance to be something it is not.

I don’t really have someplace I am going with this.I just started out to tell the story about Darien and the tooth fairy.But it really is food for thought how society sets us up to live life in a dysfunctional way by being dishonest with us from the very beginning. Are we doing children a service when we tell them about the tooth fairy and Santa Claus?I don’t know.Just some thoughts that are rattling around here on the first day of January 2012.I wonder if the Mayan’s told their children fairy tales.From what I know Native Americans – who I believe had much more functional cultures then we do – told stories that taught values and principles, and I don’t think any of them ended in happily-ever-after.I wonder where all that dishonesty came from.Oh well.

In September of 2017, I am in the midst of updating the page that I created years ago to honer my step grandson Darien – to bring people up to date on the latest happenings in my life. I had forgotten about this passage that I wrote about the Age of Reason and the dysfunctional programming of early childhood – so I decided to turn it into a blog. (Since I haven’t done one here for quite awhile.) I think it is some really valuable information – and it can help us to forgive our selves when we really look at how we were set up to expect life to be something it is not. We were just innocent little kids, it wasn’t our fault.

It is Saturday evening September 9th and I hope to have that page updated by tomorrow evening. I was working on most of the day today in an attempt to make it more Mobile Friendly. I did a lot of crying today as I went over that page. Most of it was crying from Joy and Gratitude. My D-man has brought so much Joy into my life – and I am so Grateful that I got involved with Susan so that I could be there to help raise him. There was also some grief about how hard things were much of the time – but most of the crying I did today was remembering all the incredible Joy that this blessed Spirit inhabiting Darien’s body has brought into my life. He will be 13 on his next birthday, so there will be some interesting years ahead. 🙂

Here are a couple of quotes from that page.

“Of course, part of the Divine Plan that is unfolding perfectly, was the Soul contract between his Soul and my Soul that we would meet in this lifetime at the time and place that we did in order to learn about Love together.He is a precious and wonderful blessing in my life and I thank the Goddess for the opportunity to be intimately involved with this beautiful spirit that is Darien.~ Robert 8/20/09”

“One of the things that touched me the most, was one day when we were laying on the couch as I was trying to get him to take a nap. He started digging in my back pockets and trying to take out some flyers for my workshop that I keep there in case I meet someone who might be interested. After telling him to cut it out a few times – because he does like to stall going to sleep – and him persisting, I finally let him take some of my folded up flyers and he looks at it and says, “It’s you!” (Since my picture is on it.) And then out of nowhere he gushes – gushes is the only accurate word for his tone of voice and emotional content. “I Love you! You do this for the whole world.” It felt as if his Spirit was speaking to me. I don’t know where a little 4 year old kid could come up with that kind of idea, but it didn’t feel like a little kid talking to me – I got emotional then, and I am getting emotional now as I write about it. It was one of the most touching and beautiful positive affirmations anyone has ever given me.”

” Just reminded me of something that happened a few months ago with my step grandson Darien. He will be 6 in November – and he and I have this powerful connection to each other (even look alike though there is not blood relationship.) One day he was asking questions about various things like he does (wants to know everything) and talking about when he was a baby because of a picture of him on the wall. I told him that the first time I met him (he was about 3 or 4 months old) that he cried (Susan thought it was because my deep voice scared him) – and he says, “From Joy?” It was a mind blower to me that a 5 year old understood that it was possible to cry from Joy – and that that was his assumption about what he would have felt the first time we met. :-)” – from A page dedicated to – and for – Darien